And what Nadia helped me understand, slowly, over more than one conversation, was that the voice had the whole thing backward.

The signs were not there to be missed.

That was the entire design.

A competent predator does not leave signs; he spends months, at real effort and expense, making sure there are none — that every gesture reads as love, that every question reads as interest, that the trap is indistinguishable from a gift right up until it closes.

To “see through” that, I would have had to approach the man who cooked me breakfast and fixed my daughter’s shelf as a suspect, to audit the affection of someone who had given me no reason to doubt him, to be, in other words, a person incapable of being loved at all — permanently guarded, permanently suspicious, permanently alone.

That is not wisdom.