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He is quiet. Then: "Yes. I think they do."

I hold him in the Brno dark and think about the boy and the walls and the list and the suitcase and the breakfast table in Cancun.

I think: I will never let him be alone with it again.

I don't say this out loud. It doesn't need to be said out loud. "Patrick," he says.

"Yes."

He pulls back slightly to look at me. His eyes are bright. "How did you get like this," he says. "The warmth. The openness. The way you just, move through the world like that."

I look at him.

"I don't know," I say honestly. "I think some of it was just luck. Where I grew up, who my parents were. The accident of being Patrick Sutton and not someone else."

He looks at me for a long moment.

"I'm glad you're Patrick Sutton," he says.

"I'm glad you're Jan Novak," I say. "All of him. Including the twelve-year-old who tried very hard not to be what he was."

Something moves in his face.

"He turned out fine," I say.

Jan looks at me. Then he puts his head back against my neck.

"Yes," he says. Quietly. "He did."

We stay like that as the Brno evening settles around us and the city outside does its quiet October thing and neither of us moves for a long time.

— — —

Saturday I wake before Jan.

This is unusual. Jan is always awake before me — the early riser, the one who is already at his coffee when I surface. But this morning I am awake at six and Jan is asleep and I lie in the Brno dark and feel the weight of what he told me last night sitting in my chest.

Something broken. And I was twelve years old and I had no one to tell.

I lie there for a long time.

I don't try to fix it. There is nothing to fix — Jan is not broken, Jan is the least broken person I know, Jan built himself out of that city and that silence and that particular loneliness and arrived at thirty-two with more self-knowledge and more precision and more capacity for love than most people I've met. I know this. I hold it alongside the other thing, the twelve-year-old, the managed interior, the wrong kind of space, and I don't try to resolve them. They are both true. He is both things.

I just feel the weight of it for a while.

Jan surfaces eventually. His eyes open and find me, the gradual Jan return to the world, and before he has fully arrived I pull him in.

Both arms. His face against my neck. The full version, the one that says what I don't have words for this morning.

He goes still for a second. Then his arms come around me.

"Good morning, baby," I say. Into his hair.

He makes a sound. Quiet and warm and entirely his.

We lie like that for a while.

"Okay?" he says eventually.