I started noticing the small things more after that night.
Not because they were new. They had been there from the beginning, quietly accumulating the way small things do when you are too focused on surviving to notice them arriving. But something about the kitchen at two in the morning and the way he had looked at me before he said goodnight had shifted the lens slightly and now I was seeing everything with a clarity I had not asked for and could not put back.
The way he remembered things I said in passing.
I had mentioned once, briefly and without thinking, that I found most social events exhausting in the particular way that loud crowded rooms are exhausting for people who do their best thinking in quiet. Three days later he declined a dinner invitation we had both been expected to a
