You didn’t think he would notice.

You never did. That was how you survived most of your life, wasn’t it? By slipping through the cracks, by convincing the world you were fine, by gathering your pieces in quiet corners where no one bothered to look too closely. You’d built a life out of minimizing your space, out of taking up as little room, physical or emotional, as possible. When you moved, you moved quickly, a shadow against the background noise of everyone else’s louder, brighter lives. It was an instinct, honed over decades: don’t be a burden, don’t be seen struggling. The world, in your experience, only ever offered judgment or a demand for reciprocal performance when it noticed anything broken.