Fear Is Caring About Tomorrow
“Fear is caring about tomorrow, and tomorrow had long since stopped being any of his business.” “He really wasn’t worried. Fear is caring about tomorrow, and tomorrow had long since stopped being any of his business.” We have already seen this formula in chapter ten (“A Straight Line Across the Courtyard”): the absence of fear in a person after an attempt is not courage but a symptom. The future is still not switched on. The second reason is “simpler and more shameful”: yesterday’s “please,” the fingers on his sleeve, the car that hadn’t driven off. “The hook, it seemed, was no longer only in him. Jacob was hooked. On him.”
And the conclusion he “didn’t test for strength”: “if Craig came here, Jacob would come right after him.” This is how the most dangerous configuration in a relationship with violence works: the very person the threat came from becomes the only protection against another threat. It makes leaving psychologically impossible — not because of love, but because of safety. For the reader there are two signals here at once: about Simon, to whom it is still “all the same what happens tomorrow,” and about a system in which protection is bought with belonging.
