It happens the way water shapes stone, one small correction at a time, each one reasonable on its own.

He worried when I drove at night, so he started driving.

He thought my friends were a bad influence, so the dinners grew fewer.

He didn’t like the job I wanted, and he had such good reasons, delivered so gently, that turning it down felt like my own idea.

Every fence went up disguised as a kindness, and by the time I noticed I was fenced in, I had also been taught, patiently, to distrust my own noticing — to believe that the walls were my imagination and the caretaker was my whole world.

Sitting at that observation window on no sleep, I could not have told you I was in danger.