He remembered the name of a street I had grown up on.

He paid the kind of attention that most people never pay to anyone, and I came to understand that it was a survival skill, learned across ten households: a child who must constantly adapt to new people learns to study them with a scientist’s care.

I came to find it unbearably sad, that attentiveness of his, once I understood where it came from.

Most children learn to study the adults around them a little, the way anyone learns to read the weather of a household.