It takes a long time to unlearn a whole childhood, and I won’t pretend three months had done it; there were still nights he woke with his heart going, still moments his hand went to a silent phone out of an old animal habit, still a flinch in him when a door opened behind him unexpectedly.

Healing is not a spring morning; it is slow and unglamorous and full of small relapses.

But it had begun, and the beginning was visible, and that was more than I had dared hope for in the doorway of that locked room.

We were seeing someone, both of us — Cortese had pressed a card into my hand at the end and said, gently, that the ones who get out still need help learning how to live out here, and she was right.

Julian was learning that he was allowed to want things.

It sounds so small, written down.