The Mind of an Obsessed Woman

For twenty years she has sat in a room on the top floor of a converted house off the Danforth and watched intelligent people describe the traps they built and then stepped into. There is almost no trap she cannot diagram now. The tripwire, the bait, the small door that only opens inward.

Somewhere in those twenty years she came to believe, without ever deciding it, that watching was a kind of inoculation. That a woman who could see the mechanism could not be caught in it.

Her twins leave for university in a hundred days. Her ex-husband has built a deck for a woman who is not her. In February she meets Daniel at a launch party for a book neither of them has read, and in April he emails her about a graduate student who is coming apart, and she tells herself the small lift under her sternum is the ordinary pleasure of being useful.

Eighteen months later there is a hotel room she can find in the dark, an archive of everything he has ever told her, and a wife who has known since July and has not once tried to stop it.

She can name every mechanism operating on her while it operates. She narrates her own capture with complete professional accuracy and does not stop for a second. And the thing that finally takes the floor out is not being caught, or being left. It is one quiet conversation in which she learns that the man she understood down to the wound was someone she had been reading wrong the entire time.

Contains depictions of infidelity, obsession, and psychological distress.