He did not want anything from my body or my loyalty.

He wanted a witness — one person in that house who would know the truth and could not be bought to bury it.

He had looked at a caregiver he’d known for a matter of hours and gambled that she was that person.

I would spend the following weeks trying to be worthy of a stranger’s strange, sudden trust, and it was the trust, far more than the wheelchair, that I ended up caring for.

Chapter 6 — Don’t Play the Spy