I needed a night out. After months of cutting pancakes into hearts, Googling stain removal hacks, and playing “dragon goes through airport security” with Sisyphean regularity, downing elderflower cocktails at a lavish, kid-free wedding offered a reprieve.

I laughed with abandon, danced with as much abandon as a self-monitor like me can manage, and generally revelled in release from responsibility. Until, that is, I saw a married friend flirting with a young guest.

How could he? How dare he?! With complete and categorical certainty that cheating could never be justified, I intervened. His response – not just angry but affronted – took me aback, but still, I didn’t doubt that I was in the right.

TV, movies and pop songs had told me that cheaters are bad people: selfish, callous, and depraved at their core. Sure, some songs acknowledged that the tendency to stray could be catalysed by alcohol (Kid Rock’s “Picture”) or unmet needs (Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”), and directors sometimes even encouraged me to feel affection for a character who’d landed in the wrong bed (“Brokeback Mountain”).

But the endings taught me that punishment is always warranted, like when Diane Lane’s character ruined not just her own life in Unfaithful, but also the lives of Richard Gere’s and Oliver Martinez’s characters. I learned my lesson, as Madame Bovary swallowed arsenic, Anna Karenina jumped in front of a train, and Edna Pontellier drowned.

Then, a few weeks after that wedding reception, I met Kelly. She had been in college when a man started showing up at her job with flowers and jewellery, love bombing her and telling everyone she was the perfect woman. If he’d belittled her then, she could have – and would have – walked away, but he didn’t. There was an eye roll here, a joke with a touch too much bite there, but no real red flags. So she built a life with him and had his kids. But like the fabled frog who hops into a pot of tepid water on a recently lit stove, Kelly began to boil.

I first met her husband at a party. Kelly and I were still in the heady throes of new friendship when I cheerily related to him how we’d lost track of time that morning. Due to chubby hands repeatedly chucking toys from a stroller and a scooter that just wouldn’t stay upright, we’d arrived at a children’s museum 25 minutes late for our 30-minute class.

“That’s the problem with Kelly ... she doesn’t think,” her husband responded casually, as if commenting on a missed free throw at a Bulls game. It was jarring – for me anyway. Kelly didn’t even wince.

Figuring I just needed to get to know him, I invited them on a double date at a gastro-hipster joint. A week later, we were eating at a prime table just off the sidewalk, when my husband said something about tax shelters for the uber-wealthy. I chimed in with a factoid I’d read. “She wouldn’t understand all that,” Kelly’s husband said with a dismissive flick of his hand in her direction, even though she could and did.

In private, Kelly’s husband was more direct. “This is so typical of you and your failure to anticipate the consequences of your actions,” he ripped into her one evening after she’d spent too much money on a type of lettuce he didn’t like. Other times, he’d chuckle and say, “You can’t do anything right,” in front of their kids. From where I stood, I could see that the constant name-calling and gaslighting were what was scrambling Kelly’s brain, making it hard for her to focus and follow through, and eventually transforming his putdowns into prophecies.

One Saturday, I got a sitter and met Kelly and some other mums at a big public park sans little ones. We were all basking in the slanted afternoon sun and freedom from “Look at dis, look at me, look, look,” when someone mentioned the time, and Kelly shot to her feet. Her husband had told her to be home by 5:00, and even though there was no reason to be – even though he was out and the kids had play dates – she had to make the deadline because he’d equipped every entry to their house with a sensor that reported back to his phone. She said he wanted her home because he was worried she’d cheat.

And then ... she did. She kissed someone one day and felt so whole for the first time in so long, she slept with him the next.

When she told me, I was shocked – not by what she’d done, but by my own reaction. My first thought was that the psychological domination she’d experienced had been so severe that her husband had left nothing in her control except her own body.

When Emma........

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