It wants, and it reaches, and it takes what it can grab; it is frightening in the moment and clumsy over time, and it leaves fingerprints everywhere because it cannot help itself.

Charles’s kind is the quiet one, and it is far more dangerous, because it does not take from you at all in any way you can feel.

It waits.

It earns your trust across decades, at funerals and birthdays and christenings, until trusting it is simply the texture of your life, and then it uses that trust as a key — not to break in, but to be handed the door.

A thief in the night you might catch.