"Cool! I want to ride a motorcycle!"
Diana appears in the hallway, her math textbook tucked under her arm, looking stressed. "You promised you'd help me study. The test is tomorrow morning first thing and I'm not ready."
"I remember. Give me ten minutes to put my stuff away and wash up, and I'm all yours. We'll go through everything."
She nods and disappears back toward her room. Caleb is still attached to my leg, chattering about something that happened at schoolon Friday involving a substitute teacher and a frog. I let him talk, half-listening, my mind still hours away in a motel room.
Rosalyn is in the kitchen, cleaning up from dinner, her hands in soapy water. She looks up when I come in, her eyes scanning my face the way they always do. Reading me like a book, seeing things I'm not saying.
"There's a plate in the fridge for you," she says, drying her hands on a towel. "Chicken and rice. You hungry?"
"Starving. Thank you."
I heat up the food in the microwave and sit at the kitchen table while Rosalyn finishes wiping down the counters. Caleb has finally released my leg and run off to find his dinosaur encyclopedia for tonight's reading. For a moment, it's just the two of us in the kitchen, the comfortable silence of people who know each other well.
"So," Rosalyn says, sitting down across from me, folding her hands on the table. "How was your weekend?"
"It was really good," I tell her.
Rosalyn is quiet for a moment, studying my face. I can see her weighing her words, deciding how much to say.
"Ivan, I need to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me."
"Okay." My heart starts racing.
"This bond you have with your friend, Jay. This connection that made you search for years." She pauses, choosing her words carefully. "Is it just because of what you went through together? Trauma bonding, shared history? Or is it something more than that?"
My heart stutters, then pounds. I knew this question was coming. I've been preparing for it the whole drive home, rehearsing different answers.
But now that the moment is here, I realize there's only one answer I can give.
"It's more," I say quietly. "I have feelings for him. Real feelings. Not just gratitude or trauma bonding or whatever you might be thinking. I care about him deeply. I didn't realize it until I saw him again. But my feelings are romantic for him now. We're together."
Rosalyn's expression doesn't change. She just nods slowly, like I've confirmed something she already suspected.
"How long have you known? About your feelings?"
"About my feelings for Jay? Since I found him two weeks ago and realized how much I've been missing him." I push my food around my plate, suddenly not hungry.
"And now?"
"And now I found him. And I can't pretend it's just friendship or brotherly love or whatever else would be easier to explain." I look at her directly. "I know this is a lot. I know you probably have concerns and questions. I know this isn't what you pictured for me."
"I do have concerns." She reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine, her touch warm and grounding. "But not the ones you might think. Not the ones you're afraid of."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm not concerned about you having feelings for a man. Love is love. I've always believed that. God makes people the way He makes them, and there's nothing wrong with loving who you love." She squeezes my hand. "I'm concerned about you getting hurt. You've built a good life here. A stable life. You have a job you're good at, people who care about you, a future that looks bright. And this person you care about, from what you've told me, he sounds like he's in a very fragile place. A very difficult situation."
"He is. I won't lie about that."
"People in fragile places sometimes pull others down with them. Not because they mean to, not because they're bad people, but because they're drowning and they grab onto whatever's closest." Her eyes are gentle but serious, worried. "I don't want you to drown trying to save him. I've seen it happen before. Good people with good hearts who destroy themselves trying to fix someone else."
"I won't. I'm not trying to fix him."
"You can't promise that, Ivan. You can only try your best." She sits back in her chair. "Tell me about him. Not the arrest, not the problems, not the things that scare me. Tell me about the person. Who is he underneath all of that?"
I take a breath, trying to figure out where to start, how to make her understand.
