Grief for him.

Because you cannot look at three decades of a person’s life laid out like that — every stage, every birthday, every ordinary Tuesday, all of it observed, collected, possessed — without understanding that the man in the pictures had never once, in his whole life, been alone in the way every person needs sometimes to be alone.

He had been watched.

He had been curated.

Somewhere in this house was a woman who knew what he’d worn to a friend’s party in the ninth grade and had a photograph of it, and who did not have, anywhere on any wall, a single image of that friend, because the friend had been trimmed away like a dead branch.

I thought of all the times Julian had seemed, to me, strangely unpracticed at ordinary closeness — the way he’d flinch, almost imperceptibly, when I reached for him unexpectedly, the way affection seemed to cost him a beat of calculation before he could return it.