There is a specific kind of catastrophe that happens when a woman decides to trust a man who cannot hold that trust. Not a bad man. Not a cruel one. An incompetent one. And I want to be very clear about the difference because the world keeps confusing them and it keeps costing women everything.

A bad man knows what he’s doing to you. An incompetent one just… doesn’t have the range. He showed you something that looked like safety. He meant it when he showed it to you. And then the part of him that you trusted turned out to have no control over the part of him that destroyed you. And you are left standing in the wreckage of something that was never a lie and was also never the truth.

That is what happens to Casey in Split.

She doesn’t fall for a monster. She falls for the one that felt human. One of the personalities, one of the soft ones, points to a window like he’s giving her a way out. And she reaches for it. Of course she reaches for it. She is about to die so she wants to believe the idiot that is promising that he can save her life. She has been in the dark long enough that any opening looks like a door. She is desperate for anything. And he believed it was real. That’s the part that stays with you. That’s what makes it so fucked he thought the window was real and he made her believe that too just so he could have sex with her. He wasn’t setting a trap. He just didn’t have control over what the rest of him was going to do to her.

And that is a specific kind of betrayal that nobody has named yet. The one where you weren’t wrong about what you saw. The kindness was real. The window looked exactly like a window. The problem was that the person showing it to you couldn’t protect you from himself. They can’t even save themselves, how are they even gonna save you?