the organism of family shifts to accommodate

Marathe names the disease's second victim: not the addict but the family, which reorganizes itself silently around the growing compulsion — the wife lying to cancel engagements, no one saying the thing out loud, the whole household tilting to accommodate a center of gravity it refuses to acknowledge. And the cruelest effect is epistemic: the family comes to doubt its own perceptions, each member wondering if they are the one out of balance for noticing. This is the inherited-disease's real inheritance, a household trained not to trust what it sees.