"I never said that."
"'Chest, then.'"
"I hate this family."
His mother looked over, "No, throat was right."
Bramwell stared at her in betrayal.
"You too?"
"I'm just saying," his father continued, looking delighted now, "we started timing him. We'd place bets on how long it would take before he mentioned you."
I nearly choked.
"You what?" Bramwell exclaimed.
"My personal record was forty-three seconds," his dad continued.
His mother raised a hand.
"Twenty-eight."
Bramwell looked genuinely horrified.
"You timed me?"
"We're a family," his father said with complete seriousness. "We support each other."
"That is not support."
His father pointed at him, "Son, you were ringing us every two days sounding like a man who had been struck by woodland romance."
I looked over at Bramwell. He looked at the ceiling. "I need a new family."
The table dissolved into laughter after that, warm and overlapping. Mine slipped out before I could stop it, fuller than I expected, and I felt it spread through me until I was laughing hard enough to catch my breath. When I finally looked up, Bramwell was just watching me with that small smile on his face.
********
The gifts began the way everything did with Bramwell's family, unhurried and warm, as if I had always been meant to be folded into their traditions without needing to earn my place inside them.
His mother handed me a carefully wrapped box first, watching my face with a kind of knowing softness that made my throat tighten before I even opened it. His father followed almost immediately, insisting his gift was "practically engineered for emotional well-being," which meant nothing at all and somehow made everyone laugh anyway. I gave them mine in return, simple things chosen with care, and his mother pressed a hand to her chest like I had offered her something far more meaningful than I believed I had, while his father immediately attempted to overanalyze his present with theatrical seriousness until Bramwell told him, very calmly, to stop.
Then Bramwell turned to me.
He placed a small box into my hands. When I opened it, I found a simple recording device. When I pressed play, his voice filled the space. It was him, reading. Not just one book, but many of them, carefully chosen and recorded in his own voice.
“If things start becoming too loud, too crowded, or just too much, put these on for me. I may not always be there besideyou, but I still want you to feel like you’re not alone in it,” he said softly, and something inside me tightened painfully at how naturally he had learned to make room for my silence without ever asking me to become less of it.
When it was my turn, I gave him the envelope first.
Inside were letters I had never been able to say out loud, written across different moments of time. They carried everything I was still learning quietly: how to let myself feel loved without apologizing for it, how to trust that someone could understand my silences without fearing them, and how safety could slowly begin to feel real in the hands of someone who never once asked me to become easier to love.
I then gave him his other gift. He looked at me briefly then lowered his gaze and opened it.
It was a professional watch. A luxury geology field watch, rugged and refined at once, with complications for altimeter, compass, and barometer.It was built for fieldwork, for distance, for weather, and for time spent outdoors where precision mattered.
Bramwell went still before even reading the engraving. When he finally turned it over in his hand, his thumb brushed across the back where the inscription was etched in clean, simple lettering.
