He was sitting in the sun with a drafting pad on his knee, sketching — he’d started talking, lately, about the architecture practice he’d wanted since he was young and had never once believed he was allowed to want.

And for the first time since I’d met him, his shoulders were down.

The held breath was gone.

That flat, careful, ten-year-old wariness that used to come over him at the sound of a phone had simply lifted, the way weather lifts, and left behind a man I was only now getting to meet.

He looked up and caught me watching him through the glass, and he smiled — a real smile, unguarded, all the way to his eyes, a smile with no one standing behind it.

That was the thing I noticed most in those first months of freedom — that his smiles had changed, that they no longer had that faint backward quality, that reflexive half-glance over the shoulder to check whether joy was permitted.