I kept doing things — over-giving, over-managing, making myself indispensable — because indispensable was the only way I knew to be safe.

And Reid, patiently, without ever quite naming what he was doing, kept declining to send the invoice.

He asked how my day was and waited for the real answer.

He noticed when I was tired and did not make my tiredness a problem.

He was glad when I walked into a room, for no reason connected to what I could provide.

And slowly, over years, he taught my nervous system a thing my family had spent thirty-two years teaching it was not true: that a person could want me around simply because I was me, and that this wanting would not, later, be converted into a demand.