He was working.

Behind that quiet, ceiling-staring face, Lawrence was building something — assembling, with the last clear strength of a lifelong planner, an intricate and patient machine that would protect me after he was gone, from a danger I could not yet see and would not have believed in if he had named it.

I thought I was watching my husband live out his final days in peace.

I did not understand that I was watching a man lay a trap, and that the trap was built entirely out of love, and that I was the thing it was built to keep safe.