Slowly, against every reflex the system had built into me, I let myself believe it was real.

Learning to trust, it turned out, was harder than surviving had ever been.

Surviving I knew how to do; I had done it my whole life, and it asked only that I expect nothing and defend everything.

Trust asked the opposite.

It asked me to lower defenses I had spent twenty-eight years building, to accept a kindness without waiting for the invoice, to let myself be loved without immediately calculating what the love would cost me when it was withdrawn — because in my experience love was always withdrawn, that was the one thing it reliably did.

For the first months in that penthouse I kept a bag half-packed.