The same grip. The same thumb. The thumb that had moved in training rooms and bars and alleys and hotel corridors and a thousand clinical contexts that hadn't been clinical at all, that had been the most honest thing Nathan Cross had ever done in front of me, over and over, since the beginning.
"Good game," he said.
I looked at him. At the blue eyes and the jaw and the dark hair with the silver at the temples, at the man who had sat in a chair all night and cleaned a floor and reported himself and restructured his career and chosen, repeatedly, without hesitation, to be here.
"Yeah," I said. "It was."
His thumb moved against my jaw.
Just once. Just slightly.
The corridor was quiet.
I put my hand over his, the way I'd done in a Toronto locker room at midnight, the way I'd done in a hotel room while the city was dark outside the window, the way I'd been doing since I understood that Nathan Cross's hands were where things got said that his words couldn't always get to.
He didn't move away.
He never moved away anymore.
"Let's go home," I said.
Nathan looked at me for one more moment. The full version of his smile—not almost, not the corner of his mouth, the real one, the one that had been getting closer to the surface for months and now just—lived there.
"Yes," he said.
EPILOGUE
Leo was, technically, a certified therapy cat.
I want to be clear that this had been Nathan's idea. Not the visiting part, that had been mine, an impulsive 2 a.m. idea. I'd texted Nathan a screenshot of the Boston Children's Advocacy Group website with the messagethoughts?and Nathan had responded forty minutes later withI'll look into the certification requirementswhich was Nathan Cross foryes.
The certification had taken three months. Leo had passed with what the evaluator described asexceptional temperament and unusual tolerance for chaos,which I had found deeply funny and Nathan had found deeply accurate.
So now it was a Tuesday afternoon in March. I was in full Wardens gear in the common room of a group home in Dorchester with twenty-three kids between the ages of six and fourteen. Leo was in his certified therapy cat harness—navy blue, Nathan had chosen it.It suits him, he’d said.
"Okay," I said, to the room, to the twenty-three kids who were looking at me like they had been told a hockey player was coming and weren't entirely sure what to do with that information yet. "Who knows what the Morr Roar is?"
Six hands went up. Then three more, kids who had been waiting to see if it was a trick.
"Nine of you," I said. "We can work with that." I looked at the other fourteen. "Okay so. Here's how it goes."
I demonstrated. The arms first, wide, committed, no half measures, and then the paws, which were the crucial part, the fingers curved just right, and the sound, which had to come from the chest rather than the throat or it just sounded like someone clearing something.
The room tried it back at me.
Not bad. Ragged, enthusiastic. Leo watched from the table.
"Again," said the missing-tooth girl in the front.
We went again.
Better.
A boy near the back, maybe eight, Wardens hoodie two sizes too big, the sleeves rolled up the way kids rolled sleeves when they wanted to look like they knew what they were doing, pointed across the room.
"How come that one isn't doing it?"
Twenty-three heads swiveled toward the doorway.
