He caught me looking.

For a second I worried I’d said the wrong thing with my face.

Then he shrugged one shoulder and said, almost casually, “They don’t hurt as much when nobody’s making me remember them.”

I had to turn away then because that sentence deserved privacy even inside love.

Aaron lives twenty minutes away now.

He and Nate are still learning each other. That’s the honest version. There is affection there, and guilt, and awkwardness, and effort. Real relationships are harder than miracle endings and more valuable too. Nate moved in with him full-time two years later, after he asked to. Not because our house stopped being safe. Because safety had finally made enough room for choice.

He still comes every Sunday for dinner.

Sometimes he wears gloves in winter because his hands really do get cold now.

Lila always notices and smiles at me over the table.

Last month he turned eighteen.

He asked for books, a toolbox, and a cake with terrible store-bought frosting because “fancy cake feels suspicious.” We gave him all three.

When he blew out the candles, I looked at those hands—scarred, open, unhidden—and thought about that night in the bathroom when I first saw the words.

DIRTY.

LIAR.

THIEF.

BAD BLOOD.

My father tried to carve a destiny into his palms.

What he actually carved was evidence.

The rest of Nate’s life turned out to belong to Nate.