It seemed, to a younger me, like a small way to live, a life spent guarding against dangers that mostly never came.

I understand it now.

I understand that my father’s carefulness was not fear.

It was love, translated into the only language a practical man knew how to speak it in.

He could not say, in words, everything he felt about protecting his daughter; he was not that kind of man.

So he said it in cameras, and copies, and lessons about locks, and a security system linked to a server, and a drive in a drawer marked KEEP COPIES.

Every careful thing he ever did was a way of saying I want you to be safe even when I am not here to keep you safe. And then he died, and a year later a man tried to kill me in a kitchen, and every one of those careful, tiresome, loving little precautions rose up at once and stood between his daughter and her murderer, exactly as he had, without ever knowing the specific danger, intended them to.