I had been coached to expect him.

I had been told that the charm of a first meeting often gave way to the testing, the acting out, the thousand small cruelties a traumatized child uses to find out whether you will leave like all the others.

He never appeared.

Not once in four months.

Instead, what I found was a boy who noticed everything — who caught the details that everyone else let slide right past them.

He remembered that I took my coffee a particular way after I had mentioned it exactly once.