The short version is that my mother struggled with something she was deeply ashamed of, a compulsion she could not control, and she had hidden the evidence of it away behind a locked door for years, and when I finally found it, as a child, it taught me a lesson I carried much too far into adulthood: that a closed door in someone you love is a warning, that private spaces conceal painful truths, that the people who seem gentlest can be hiding the heaviest things.

And the tragedy of a lesson like that, learned young and learned through real pain, is that it does not stay in its lane.

It does not politely confine itself to the specific situation that taught it.

It generalizes.

It seeps outward, quietly, until it has colored your entire way of seeing, until every closed door in the world, in anyone, becomes a little charged with menace, a small locked closet waiting to be pried open to reveal its wound.

I did not walk around consciously suspicious of everyone; on the surface I was trusting, easygoing, the kind of daughter-in-law who prides herself on respecting privacy.