That when a seventy-five-year-old woman says her stomach hurts, the reflex of nearly everyone around her — her family, her doctors, sometimes even herself — is to file it under the general, dismissible category of getting old, rather than to ask the harder question of whether something is actually wrong.

Age makes a person invisible in a very specific way: not unseen, exactly, but unheeded, present but no longer quite counted as a reliable witness to her own life.

And a predator like Richard does not have to work to create that invisibility.

It is already there, built into how the whole society treats the old.

He only had to point at it. Nobody believes an old woman with stomach pains. He was not describing a risk he was taking.

He was describing a certainty he was relying on — the certainty that the world had already decided, long before he ever appeared, to stop taking my mother seriously.