It is the necessary architecture of any life that includes love, because love is impossible without the lowering of the guard.

And it is precisely this necessary architecture that the long-game predator exploits.

Luca did not fool me in a moment.

He fooled me over forty years, by being, for four decades, exactly the friend I believed him to be — because the trust he was building was the weapon he intended, one day, to use.

A stranger who tried to harm Jessi would have had to get past all my defenses.

Luca had to get past none, because I had dismantled them all myself, years earlier, in the ordinary act of loving my friend.