That boy had believed, all the way down, that he was alone — that his aloneness was a permanent fact about the universe, as fixed as gravity.

And here was the same boy, two years later, unable to leave the country because too many people had come to say goodbye.

It was not that his circumstances had changed, though they had.

It was that the belief itself had been a lie, and had always been a lie, even in the worst of it.

He had never actually been alone.

The neighborhood had seen him.