The way he already seemed to know certain things about me before I told him.

The way his eyes would fill, unaccountably, when I mentioned my mother, or my childhood, or the father I had never known.

Once, when I told him, bitterly, that my father had left before I was born and never looked back, Julian had gone very still and turned his face to the window, and when he turned back his eyes were wet, and I had thought, how kind, that my small sad story could move a stranger so.

He had not been moved as a stranger.