Behind Closed Doors

She was waiting tables at a diner when Evan Sinclair asked her out. Confident, well dressed, entirely unlike anyone who had shown an interest in her before, he moved her into a life she had no way of affording on her own: the apartment, the clothes, all of it.

The conditions arrive gradually. Rules that are never stated but are clearly rules. Decisions taken on her behalf and presented as care. The harder she works to keep hold of the life, the less of herself there is in it.

Evan will not discuss his past, and asking about it is the one thing that reliably makes his temper show. Rowen Chambers keeps the book in first person, so the reader watches the narrator explain each new restriction to herself as generosity, right up to the point where she finds out what he has not been telling her and has to work out whether there is still a way out.