The people who are hardest to read emotionally aren’t mysterious. They learned early that being legible made them a target.

My wife and I have a running observation about the families she works with in immigration law. The clients who seem the calmest in her office, the ones who answer questions with flat precision and betray nothing in their faces, are almost never the ones with the simplest cases. They are the ones who learned, often as children, that showing fear or confusion to the wrong person could cost them everything. I think about that pattern constantly, because it maps onto something much broader than immigration proceedings.