Just my name.

He set the storybook down carefully on the bench beside him, and he leaned down and said something quiet and kind to the little boy, some apology, some promise to finish the story another day, and then he pushed himself up to standing, and I saw how much even that cost him now, the slight awkwardness of it, the care.

He took three hesitant steps toward me across the grass, and then he stopped.

He stopped as though there were a wall between us that he could not cross, and he looked down at the ground, his shoulders curving inward, for all the world like a child who has been caught doing something he was told not to do.