Three weeks later, in a cafe, Silas slid a chocolate chip cookie across the table toward me with a perfectly serious expression.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“I checked it.

No raisins.”

I stared at him.

“You remembered that?”

“It was nothing,” he said, shrugging, looking away, suddenly awkward with having been caught caring.

It was the awkwardness that stayed with me — the way he deflected the moment he was seen being kind, as though caring were a vulnerability he had been punished for before and had learned to disguise.