He was outside our house that night. I saw him from Noah’s window at eleven, a still shape at the edge of the streetlight, not moving, not approaching, just standing where he could see the house and the house could, if it looked, see him.
He was there the next night too. And the one after that.
By the third night I stopped drawing Noah’s curtains all the way, just so I could check, and told myself it was only to make sure he hadn’t been hurt keeping whatever promise he thought he owed us. By the fifth night I brought a blanket out to the letterbox at two in the morning and left it on the fence post without saying a word to him, and went back inside before I had to see whether he used it.
He didn’t sleep, I was fairly sure. He didn’t seem to need to, not the way the rest of us did, but I liked to imagine some version of him resting anyway. But out there in the cold, he kept a watch nobody had asked him to keep and nobody could talk him out of.
Noah asked, on the sixth morning, why Damian hadn’t been round in a while.
“He’s busy,” I told him, which wasn’t a lie so much as an incomplete truth, the kind I’d promised myself I’d stop telling.
By the seventh night I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went out in my dressing gown, arms wrapped around myself against the cold, and stood at the end of the path looking at him standing at the end of the street, and neither of us said anything for a long moment.
“You don’t have to keep doing this,” I said finally.
“I do, actually.” His voice carried easily across the quiet street. “I don’t know how to do anything else with what I’m feeling right now except stand somewhere I can see you’re safe.”
“You look exhausted.”
“I don’t get exhausted.” A small, tired smile, the first one I’d seen from him in a week. “I get worried. It manifests strangely, apparently.”
I didn’t invite him in. I wasn’t ready for that yet. But I stood there a while longer than I needed to, and when I finally turned to go back inside, I told him, “Noah’s got a camp coming up. Cubs. A week away, with the older kids.” I don’t know why I told him that, except that it felt like the first ordinary thing I’d said to him in seven days, and ordinary, right then, felt like the beginning of something.
“When?” he asked, and I understood, from the careful way he asked it, that he already knew exactly what I might be about to offer him, and was doing everything in his power not to hope for it too loudly.
“Next week,” I said, and went inside before either of us could make more of it than it was.