“There’s more,” Julian said, and I could see what it cost him to keep going, each sentence pulled up from somewhere deep and long-buried.

“I need to say it out loud, because I’ve never said it out loud, not once in my whole life.”

He told me about the pattern.

About how, for as long as he could remember, anyone who got close to him had eventually gone away.

A best friend in high school whose family abruptly moved, who never wrote again.

A college roommate who cut him off after one strange conversation with Victoria that Julian was never told the content of.