I already knew this was one of those.
• • •
“I forget it looks like this,“ he said eventually.
“Like what?”
He gestured vaguely at all of it. The neighborhood. The houses. The lights coming on one by one below us like something being slowly lit from the inside.
“Normal,“ he said. ’From up here it just looks — normal.“
Something in his voice made me look at him.
He was staring out at it with an expression I didn’t see often. Unguarded. Quiet in a way that wasn’t his usual closed-off quiet. Something else.
• • •
“Do you ever just —“ He stopped. Started again. “Do you ever think about leaving?”
“Leaving where?”
“Here.” A pause. “Home.”
I thought about it honestly.
“Sometimes. But I’m not in a hurry.”
He nodded slowly.
“I think about it all the time,“ he said.
There was something underneath it. I waited.
“Just away.”
My chest tightened. Away from me?
“Away from what?”
He was quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding something.
“My dad’s —" He stopped. His jaw moved. “He’s not easy to live with. You know that.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know all of it.”
He said it simply. No drama. Just fact.
I looked at him and he was still looking out at the neighborhood, his profile sharp against the darkening sky, and I wanted so badly to ask him what all of it was.
To finally be let through the door he’d always kept closed.
But I didn't push. I took whatever he was willing to give. Every time.
“I know,” I said again. Softer this time.
• • •
