Hot take: I think the Nicolette-Seth caretaking situation should have been more of a torment nexus for everyone involved. The Nicolette we saw in mid to late Pale had the patience of a saint, in a way that doesn't actually feel consistent with the Nicolette of early Pale who dealt with feeling powerless by hurting the people around her, in order to assert any sense of control. And the Seth we saw in, especially in late Pale, could not possibly have reacted well to being completely in the power of someone else to that level.
Even if Nicolette was trying her best, there was no way she could completely mitigate all the effects of being forsworn. If she wasn't trying her best, well... there are a lot of opportunities for little, petty cruelties when taking care of someone else. And she did have her own business and apprentice to attend to. If Seth developed a gastrointestinal illness and at the same time his toilet broke and Nicolette didn't come back to fix it for another six hours, who's to say that she wasn't just busy doing her own thing, instead of deliberately making him wait because the other day he called her a puffed-up bint who'd never be able to leave the Belanger Circle behind?
