I thought the six weeks of tenderness that had been the brightest thing in my recent life were about to be revealed as some kind of scheme, that the lonely dying man I had loved had been using me for a purpose I could not yet imagine, and that I was a fool who had been played.

That is what the word trap means, in the ordinary way of things: a thing that catches you, that deceives you, that closes around you to your harm.

It would take Mr.

Vance the better part of an hour to teach me that there is another kind of trap entirely, one I had never heard of and could scarcely believe in even as I sat inside it, a trap that a person builds not to harm you but to save you, and springs not against you but for you, and that this second kind was the only kind Julian Vance had ever built.”

Chapter 11 — The Empty Lobby