I had spent thirty-four years reading that face, and it had never once, in a single line of it, told me the truth.

And so I learned, at that table, the thing I most did not want to know: that evil does not announce itself, that it wears the faces we trust most precisely because those are the faces we do not think to check, and that a person can hold your whole history in her steady hands and still be reaching, with those same hands, to end you.

I do not say this to frighten anyone.

I say it because I wish someone had said it to me, in time.