Every hand she held, every worried question about whether I was eating and sleeping, every quiet tear at every goodbye, every single moment of it, she had given knowingly, to a young man she knew perfectly well was not her son, and had chosen to love anyway.

The deception had never been mine at all.

I had thought I was fooling her.

She had quietly decided to keep me.

And the more I sat with it, the more the whole shape of those six months inverted in my understanding, and every memory I had of them changed its meaning.

The first visit, when I thought I was so nervous and she was so trusting; she had been reading me the whole time, watching the guilty young man fumble through a performance, and had chosen, in that first hour, not to expose me but to receive me.

Every time she called me Arthur, which I had taken as the sad drift of a failing mind, she may well have been giving me cover, letting me keep the fiction that let me keep coming.