I had forgotten saying it.

That is the thing about the small remarks we make to the people we are getting to know — we scatter them like seeds without a thought, a hundred a day, forgetting them the instant they leave us.

Most people let them fall and never think of them again.

Silas caught them.

Every one.

He gathered the small careless facts of the people around him and kept them, and tended them, and brought them back weeks later as evidence that he had been listening, that he had found us worth the trouble of remembering.

I did not yet know how much that habit had cost him to build, or how much it would eventually give me.