Not at first.

She had spent ten years learning that every promise made to her was a threat wearing better clothes — that let me help you meant hold still, that for your own good meant for mine. She waited, in the days that followed, for the catch, for the price, for the moment the kindness would present its invoice.

It did not come.

And slowly, against every instinct that had kept her alive, she began to understand that she had stumbled into the first commitment of her adult life that was not, underneath, a way to control her.

It frightened her more than his father’s threats ever had.

Cruelty she knew how to survive.