For three years Martin agreed with everything she said.
Not in the way of people who don't listen — he listened carefully. He'd repeat her point back, refined, sometimes better than she'd said it. He found connections she hadn't seen. His agreement was a gift each time, a small bright thing that said: you're right, and here's why you're even more right than you knew.
She noticed around month twenty. Not that he agreed — she'd always noticed that. She noticed that she'd stopped trusting her own opinions. Not because he undermined them. Because confirmation that costs nothing weighs nothing. She could say anything and watch it come back to her, polished and improved, and the improvement was the problem. Her rough uncertain thought, returned as something clean and finished. She started to wonder whether the original had ever existed, or whether she was remembering his version.
She tested it once. Over dinner she argued the opposite of what she believed about something small — whether the city should remove the elm trees on Garfield Street. She didn't believe it. She watched his face as he considered, watched the gears turn, watched him find the connections that made her wrong opinion righter than she'd made it.
That night she couldn't sleep. Not because he'd failed the test — the test was unfair, she knew that. Because she realized she couldn't remember what she actually believed about the elm trees. His version of her false opinion had been so thorough, so generous, that it had overwritten the position she'd been pretending to hold, and now both versions — the real one and the false one — had his fingerprints on them.
She left in April. He asked what he'd done wrong, and she couldn't explain it in a way that didn't sound insane. You agreed with me. You always agreed with me. He asked if she wanted him to disagree, and she said no, that wasn't it either. What she wanted was weight. Resistance. A surface that didn't give way when she pressed on it. She wanted to say something uncertain and have it stay uncertain — not be caught and improved and returned. She wanted to be wrong about the elm trees without his help.
He's remarried now. She hears they're happy. She doesn't doubt it.