But it did not frighten me.

It did the opposite.

It meant that the enormous trust he was placing in me was not a gamble born of desperation but a judgment arrived at slowly, by a shrewd old man who had spent a lifetime learning to read people and had rarely been wrong.

He had not reached for me because I was near.

He had chosen me because he had looked, carefully, and decided I was the one person worth choosing.

There are worse things to learn about yourself than that.