“Your history with that man is yours,” he said.

“The company is mine.

I have no interest in using your past as a weapon against anyone, and I won’t.” After twelve years among people who stepped over my boundaries and called it family, being handed my own privacy back by a near-stranger did something to me I did not have words for.

It made me trust him, which turned out to be the most important thing that happened in that house.

I want to sit with that, because it took me a while to understand why so small a thing landed so hard.