He Thinks I'm Not Watching
He calls me honey so you won't hear me scream.
Savannah, Georgia, 1997. Clara Vance has spent eleven months being told she is losing her mind.
Her husband Julian is a partner at one of the oldest law firms in the city. He is charming, patient and endlessly kind - in front of other people. He answers the telephone. He chooses her clothes. He counts out the blue pills that turn ten in the morning into four in the afternoon with nothing in between.
Everyone on Gaston Street agrees he is a saint for staying.
Then, on an ordinary Sunday, Clara watches her husband creep down his own hallway and hide something small and bright in a drawer.
And she stops swallowing the pills.
She starts keeping a record instead. Forty-three tablets in the base of a grandfather clock. Eleven letters to a neighbour who never replies. Marsh mud in a sandwich bag. A pager code in pencil on the back of a grocery list.
Because Clara has worked out three things. That the woman before her was real. That her husband is not finished. And that in four days he intends to take her somewhere she will not come back from.
Nobody is coming to help her. She has counted on that, too.
She was never the fragile one. She was the witness.
A slow-burn Southern Gothic thriller of coercive control, gaslighting, a house with a locked room, and one woman who kept the receipts.
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