Silas did not just notice broken things.

He fixed them.

It was the same impulse that had sent him under a table after a stranger’s crayon, the same one that had him checking a cookie for raisins — a deep, almost involuntary reflex toward repair, toward making things a little more right for the people around him.

A boy like that had been labeled a problem by ten families and a thick agency file.

A boy whose entire instinct ran toward fixing what was broken had been catalogued as broken himself.