I watched the words land on him and fail, at first, to compute.

He had steeled himself so completely for the opposite response — for disappointment, for withdrawal, for the slow start of the end — that praise simply would not fit through the door he had braced shut.

He stared at me as though I had spoken a language he did not know.

And I understood that I would have to say it more than once, in more than one way, over a long time, before he believed that the thing he had been most ashamed of, the secret he was sure would make me give him back, was in fact the very thing that made me proudest to call him mine.”

He looked at me then, wrecked and disbelieving, a boy who had braced his whole life for the opposite answer.