He was sixteen, all wrists and Adam’s apple, and it turned out his family ran the grocery on the corner, and Franny had been mending his school things since he was small enough that she took up the hems and then let them down again year after year as he shot up.

He hadn’t known she’d died.

His family had been back in Amman for two months for a grandmother’s illness, and they’d come home to a shop with the lights off, and he’d been walking past it every day not knowing why it hurt to.

He took the blazer and put it on right there and looked at himself in the long mirror, the shoulders sitting right, and his chin did a thing I recognized, because my own chin had been doing it for four months.

“She always did the shoulders,” he said, to the mirror.