There is a hollow in him that blood was never enough to fill. I did not know, when I met him, that I would be the one to fill it. I did not know, either, exactly what that would eventually make me.
Graduation happened on a grey Tuesday in early December, barely a month after the night that still didn’t feel entirely real to either of us, under a marquee on the university oval because the hall’s roof was still being re-slated after a storm in June. I sat between Noah and Priya, watching Damian cross a stage in a gown that had been tailored to fit shoulders it was never designed for, and thought, not for the first time, how strange it was to watch someone graduate who had already outlived the university itself several times over, when it had only been a handful of months since I’d first watched him catch a basketball meant for my face.
He came home that night with a scroll he had no real use for and a restlessness I’d learned to recognize fast, for how little time I’d actually had to learn him. It showed in small things. The way he stood at the window longer than the view warranted. The way he answered questions about his family with the same three careful sentences every time, worn smooth from use, like a stone he’d been turning over in his pocket for centuries.
“You still haven’t told me what you eat,” I said, once Noah was asleep and it was just the two of us at the kitchen table, his hand finding mine across it before I’d even finished the sentence, the way it always did now, like touching me was simply where his hands went when they weren’t otherwise occupied.
“I eat what you eat.” He said it lightly, the way he said most things he didn’t want examined too closely. “Toast. Too much coffee. Noah’s terrible attempts at baking.”
“Damian.”
“Sarah.”
“I mean it. I know how old you are. I watched you break three men’s arms and I have never once flinched away from any of it. But I still don’t actually know what you need to survive, and it’s starting to feel like the one door you won’t open.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought I’d pushed too hard.
“There’s a lot I haven’t told you,” he said finally, bringing my hand to his mouth and pressing his lips to my knuckles, an old-fashioned gesture that should have looked silly and instead undid me a little every time. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because some of it happened somewhere I haven’t let myself think about in a long time, and I don’t know how to explain the rest of it without going back there first.”
“Where?”
He turned my hand over, tracing one slow line across my palm.
“Rome,” he said. “Where it started. Where I did.”
He asked me properly two nights later, which was very like him, giving a thing time to breathe before he pushed it toward me.
“Come to Rome with me,” he said. “You and Noah both, over the summer break, once school’s out. Three weeks. I want to show you where I’m from. Or where I stopped being from anywhere, depending on how you look at it.”
“That’s not really an answer to what I asked the other night.”
“No,” he agreed. “But it’s a start. Some things I can’t say at a kitchen table in Glenfrost. They need the right ground under them.”
I should have asked more questions. I know that now. But there was something in the way he said it, quiet and a little afraid in a way I’d almost never seen from him, five hundred years of composure cracking just enough to let me see he actually needed this, and I found I didn’t have it in me to make him ask twice.
“I’ve never been overseas,” I admitted. “Not once. Michael always said we’d go when Noah was older, when we had the money, when, when, when.”
“Then it’s time somebody stopped saying when.” He pulled me into him, chin resting on the top of my head the way it did when he wanted me to feel, rather than hear, what he meant. “Let me take you both. Let me show you the version of the world I’ve been carrying around inside me this whole time.”
Noah, when we told him, greeted the news of three weeks in Rome with the barely contained hysteria of a seven-year-old handed both Christmas and his birthday at once, and immediately wanted to know if Rome had lions, whether the Colosseum was “the real one,” and whether it counted as a holiday homework excuse if he learned everything from “actually being there instead of a book.”
“It absolutely counts,” Damian told him, perfectly serious, and caught my eye over Noah’s head with the particular warmth he saved for moments like this, small and domestic and entirely unlike anything five hundred years should have left room for wanting.