He rubbed the pale pine dust off his shirt cuff with his thumb until it collected in a little line on his jeans, and I watched his hands instead of his face, because his face was doing something I did not have a name for and did not want to see too closely.

“Did she lock it at night, too?” he asked.

“While you were sleeping?”

I decided, in that moment, not to protect him from the answer.

It was a decision.

For a year I had been managing what the adults around me could bear to know, curating the truth into pieces small enough to keep everyone comfortable, and I understood, sitting in that truck, that the managing was part of what had trapped me.