She read the list. She felt something — not the rosemary feeling, something sharper. Something with an edge. She kept reading.
The notebooks described Rohini ending things with Layla and Layla not accepting the ending. The calls. The appearances at her office. The specific techniques of someone who had built access to another person over three years and was not going to give up that access because the other person wanted them to. She knows my schedule better than I do. She knows my friends. She knows my routines. This is not an accident — this is a thing that was built, carefully, over time, and I did not see it being built because I was in it while it was being built.
The last red notebook had the most recent entries. Eleven months ago, ten, nine — each entry tenser, each entry describing a new incident. Layla at the apartment building. Layla sending things to her colleagues. Layla contacting people from Rohini's past, telling stories, building a narrative about Rohini that was designed to make her look unstable, unreliable. Classic destabilisation. Dr. Lata says this is a documented pattern. I know it is. I have read about it. Reading about it and experiencing it are different things. When you experience it you have to keep reminding yourself: this is real, this is happening, the person doing this is a real person who has made real choices. The gaslighting is an attempt to make you doubt the reality of your own experience. The answer is to document. To write it down. To make it external and undeniable.
