Nick
The first thing that arrived was a thought.
It didn't come with any grand emotion or dramatic realization; it simply floated up out of the gray blankness before my eyes could even cooperate with the basic instruction to open.
You have never needed anyone.
It wasn't an expression of self-pity.
It was just the most thoroughly verified fact I possessed about my own existence, the same way a surgeon understands the clean, unfeeling anatomy of a specific organ.
It was simply true.
For twenty-six years, I had been the kind of person other people orbited without ever being invited to do so.
They arrived in my vicinity, they stayed, and they waited to see if I would find a use for them.
My father had been the primary architect of that design. Bennett ran our household with the cold, measured efficiency of an annual corporate performance review.
Affection was a currency, conditional, meticulously earned, and instantly withdrawn the exact second your standards dipped.
