You can wish someone well and still keep them far away from you.

Those two things are allowed to be true at the same time.” I wanted her to have that lesson young, and to have it clean, because I have watched too many people, grown adults, get it tangled.

They are taught, somewhere along the way, that love means unlimited forgiveness, that a good person keeps letting others back in no matter what those others do, that boundaries are a kind of cruelty.

And so they leave their doors open to people who have proven, again and again, that they cannot be trusted inside, and they call this virtue, when really it is only a failure to protect what is theirs to protect.