SOFIA
I stopped pushing. Not completely, and certainly not because I had found peace with the stone walls of the Morelli estate. I stopped visibly. There is a profound, strategic difference between the two.
Up until now, everything I’d done had been reactive. I had behaved like a trapped animal, testing the bars of the cage, lunging at the shadows, pushing until something pushed back harder. It made sense at the time; it was the only way to map the topography of my imprisonment. But I knew where the edges were now. More importantly, so did he. Every time I resisted in the same predictable ways, I was merely confirming his data. I was repeating a loop he had already accounted for in his "long-term objectives."
So I changed my approach. I decided to stop being the variable and start being
