The drugs were a sedative and an appetite stimulant, neither labeled nor prescribed to me. Two years of swollen cheeks, exhaustion, hunger, and mental fog looked different. I remembered the mornings Rowan handed me the capsules when his mother was busy. Coralie had not been helping me conceive. She had been keeping me quiet, dependent, and too tired to imagine a life outside her family.

I never learned whether Rowan knew. Perhaps Coralie acted alone, driven by a need to control her son’s wife. Perhaps Rowan never understood what he was giving me. But he handed me pills himself and never asked what they were. Eventually I decided that not knowing, when asking would have been easy, was its kind of answer.

I could have reported Coralie. I had laboratory results, samples, photographs, and enough memories to make a story. But I also had a place at Edinburgh and no desire to spend years traveling back to the city I had escaped. A criminal case would put my body, marriage, medical history, and humiliation into records I could never take back. I had spent two years being made small. I refused to spend two more proving that I had been harmed.

So I chose the smaller freedom. I finished my degree. Rowan married Sabine eighteen months later; I heard she had documented their romance in photographs, and I hope she is well. I work in research now, in a city where nobody hands me pills. My mother attended my graduation and cried. Watching her, I understood why she had walked away from my father without fighting for everything. Some victories cost more than the loss. I am still unsure whether I chose justice or simply survival, but I know this: Coralie kept her clean name, and I kept my life.