He had built the instrument of his own undoing, and handed it to me, and forgotten he had done it, because he could not conceive of me as a person capable of using it.

And there is a lesson in that so precise it feels almost designed, and it is the same lesson at the heart of every story of an underestimated person who finally rises: that contempt is not merely an insult but a blindness, and the blindness is what destroys the person who holds it.

My father did not fail to defend himself against me because he was careless.

He failed because defending himself against me would have required him first to perceive me as a possible threat, and his contempt made that perception literally impossible.