My Wife Woke in a Hospital Bed, Saw the Tattoo I’d Hidden for Four Years, and Instead of Asking Me to Make Them Disappear, She Said the Six Words That Set Me Free: “No Bodies. Ruin Them in the Light.”

We only had to offer them the thing they were already reaching for, and step back, and let their own hunger walk them into the room.

That is the quiet mercy and the quiet horror of people like Rosalind: they are so busy assuming everyone else is prey that they never learn to recognize a trap, because a trap, to them, is something you set for other people.

I had learned, long ago and at great cost, that the surest way to take down someone who thinks they are the smartest person in the room is to agree with them, and wait.

Rosalind thought her daughter had finally broken.