He Cheated, I Exposed His Muse Secret

Ryan was in charge of "faking symptoms" at home. He rearranged the furniture while I was asleep. When I woke up and told him things had been moved, he just frowned at me. "Nina, no one touched anything. Are you…?" He hid my diary in the trash can in the middle of the night. When I searched the whole house and couldn't find it, he comforted me softly. "You were in a bad mood yesterday. You probably threw it away yourself. You just forgot." He slipped Valium into my tea. When I drifted in and out of it and mumbled nonsense, he pulled out his phone to record me, then sent the video to Sarah Lane. Sarah Lane was in charge of "confirming the diagnosis" at her clinic. She held the "evidence" Ryan gave her, all those "records of illness" he'd made up himself, and flipped through them with a professionally serious face. "Mrs. Miller, your memory loss is getting worse and worse." "This is a classic dissociative symptom. I recommend upping your dose." The meds she prescribed for me piled up more and more, and every new drug made me a little slower, a little duller. At my worst, I had to think three full seconds before I could even say my own name. And Ryan just sat across from me. He held my hand, tears shining in his eyes: "Nina, don't worry. I'm right here with you." Then that same night, he locked his study door and wrote like a man possessed: Her eyes have gone completely blank, like a butterfly flying into a snowstorm. I hold her in my arms, and I know I'm losing her. That passage later ended up on the dust jacket of his book and brought millions of readers to tears. But the night he wrote those words, I lay in bed shaking all over and threw up three times from the side effects. He smashed my vase, then held me gently and said, "It's okay." After I'd cried my eyes out, he locked his study door. My tears became the dramatic centerpiece of his writing. He hid my sleeping pills and watched me lie awake all night until I finally cracked. The next morning he handed me a warm glass of milk. There was something in that milk that made me groggy all day. When I woke up after sleeping the whole day away, he said, "You passed out again. Dr. Lane says this is a new symptom." Three years. More than a thousand days and nights. He faked my "madness." Sarah Lane stamped and confirmed my "madness." Then he turned my "madness" into a tearjerker love story that moved the whole internet. A perfect little factory line. I still screamed at the top of my lungs that I wasn't sick, but every scream just got a new label slapped on it by them. "Delusions of persecution." "Paranoid personality disorder." "Condition worsening." When Sarah pushed the book toward me again today, I looked down at Ryan's sweet face on the cover and suddenly asked: "Dr. Lane, when did you become a fan of my husband's books? Was it before or after you became my psychiatrist?" Sarah's smile froze for half a second. That half second was all I needed. I snatched the book, stood up, and walked toward the window. She shot up from her chair, "Mrs. Miller! What do you think you're doing?" I pushed the window open. The telephoto lenses of the paparazzi downstairs all snapped up at the same time. I tore the book apart page by page. The scraps floated through the air, and camera shutters went off like crazy. Sarah's face went pale. She grabbed her phone to text Ryan. I turned back to her and smiled. "Dr. Lane, I've looked through your f*******: page. You were posting and recommending his books four years ago. You only became my doctor three years ago. You used his viral quotes from the book to treat me and made me believe he was the best husband in the world. You two have been playing this game for three years." Sarah stood there with her mouth open, completely speechless. "And I've already sent samples of the meds you prescribed me to a third-party lab for testing." Her face turned completely pale. I pushed the door open and walked out without looking back. He loves writing about how insane I am, right? Fine. I'll give him a real big show of crazy. Crazy enough that his little script can't keep up. Crazy enough that even his damn pen won't know what to write.