It was the being cared for that she had no map for.

She kept waiting to catch him in it — the lie under the kindness, the angle she couldn’t yet see.

In those first weeks she tested him without meaning to, the way an animal that has been mistreated tests a gentle hand: flinching, watching, braced for the blow that had always come before.

When he asked her opinion, she waited for the trap in the question.

When he left a door open, she wondered what he wanted her to walk through.

She had been conditioned so thoroughly, over so many years, that safety itself read to her nervous system as a threat she hadn’t identified yet.