Marcus's POV — The Following Days
I told myself I was watching over her.
That was the version I lived inside for as long as I could sustain it. The reframe that made the behaviour navigable — made it something I could look at without flinching. Surveillance became care. Proximity became protection. The need to know where she was at every hour of the day became something righteous, something justified, something a man did when the person he loved was moving through a world that had already proven it could hurt her.
I was good at it. The reframing. I had always been good at finding the version of a thing that allowed me to keep doing it.
Raphael said nothing for the first week. That was how I knew he was worried — Raphael's silences were not comfortable ones, they were the silences of a
