He said it four or five times, with increasing volume, in a car, and then he cried, which he had not done in front of me since he was about eleven, and then he said the thing that I think about most often out of everything anybody said in that entire year.

He said: “You’re going to go back and sleep in that house and I’m going to be here doing a chemistry test.”

I have thought a great deal about what it does to a boy to be the one who raised the alarm and then be sent back to his dormitory to wait.

He texted me every night at nine for nineteen nights.

Just the word ok? And I sent back ok, and that was the entire exchange, nineteen times, and I still have all of them.