Every time I avoided a fight, she had filed it away as a lever.

The intimacy I thought we had was, from her side, reconnaissance; the softness I had shown her, which I had believed was the safety of being loved, had been catalogued as weakness to be exploited.

I do not tell this part to invite pity.

I tell it because I think it is important for people to understand that the danger from a person like Vanessa is not that they hate you.

It is that they study you, patiently and without feeling, the way one studies a lock.