Winter deepened, and so did we.
We were careful, Damian never stayed past three in the morning, always gone before Noah woke, and some nights we met instead at a small guesthouse two towns over, where nobody knew the Calloway name or cared what an age gap looked like from the outside. I told myself the secrecy was sensible caution. Some nights I let myself believe it was simply that I wasn’t ready to explain to the town what I barely understood myself.
Noah adored him, not knowing, of course, what Damian was to me, only that “Coach Damian” was the person who taught him to breathe through his anger and who, increasingly, stayed for dinner and laughed at Noah’s terrible knock-knock jokes with a patience that had no bottom.
There were things I noticed, in those weeks, that I noticed and quietly chose not to ask about. He never ate more than a few bites of anything I cooked. He ran hotter in some moments and colder in others, his skin shifting temperature like weather. He was never once tired, no matter how late we stayed up, no matter how early Noah’s boxing sessions started. And there was a stillness to him sometimes, a way of simply not moving, not breathing, for whole minutes, that I told myself was meditation, was an athlete’s discipline, was anything other than what some small, frightened corner of my mind kept whispering it might be.
I loved him. The truth settled quietly within me, beyond reason and beyond explanation, tender and undeniable. I loved him enough to be afraid, not of his strangeness, but of holding something precious again, knowing how easily precious things can slip away.
It started showing at work, the way these things always do, in the small looks and smaller silences of people who think they’re being subtle.
Damian had taken to collecting me from the gym some evenings, leaning against the wall by reception in that unhurried way of his, and it took exactly two occasions before Priya on the front desk started raising an eyebrow every time the bell over the door went, and three before Fenella from the eight o’clock Pilates class cornered me in the staff room with a look I recognised from every small town I’d ever lived in.
“That’s the university boy, isn’t it,” she said, not quite a question. “The basketball one.”
“He coaches my son,” I said, which was true, and which fooled nobody.
“Mm.” She poured her tea with the particular slowness of a woman deciding how much to say. “He’s very good-looking, Sarah. People are going to talk.”
“People always talk.”
“Not usually about someone we all watched cry at her husband’s funeral.” It wasn’t unkind, exactly, Fenella had brought a casserole round in those first terrible weeks and never once mentioned it since, but it landed somewhere tender all the same. “I just don’t want you getting hurt. That’s all.”
I told her there was nothing to worry about, and went back out to reception, where Damian was crouched by the door talking to a toddler in a stroller as though he had all the patience in several worlds for it, and felt the lie sit uneasily in my chest the whole drive home.