Then his mother preferred the good china put away when my friends came, and preferred my friends came less.

Each preference was small, and reasonable-sounding, and easy to grant, and to refuse any single one would have made me the difficult one, the one who couldn’t compromise.

So I granted them, one after another, and did not notice that I was signing away my own life in installments too small to feel — until I looked up one day and found that my world had shrunk to the size of their approval, and that I spent my hours reading the barometric pressure of two people’s moods so I could adjust myself before the storm.

That is what it does.

It does not lock the door.

It convinces you, kindness by kindness, that you never wanted to leave the room.