The knowledge sat in my body like a second skeleton.
I woke the next morning already knowing the shape of it—the hotel room, the tangled sheets, the wet rhythmic sounds, the exact moment Daniel’s eyes met mine while another man was still inside him. The images did not arrive as memory. They arrived as fact. Hard. Immovable. Permanent. I lay on the thin hostel mattress with the weak winter light pressing against the curtains and catalogued the new break the way I used to catalogue bruises after a hard game. Location. Depth. Whether it would heal or simply become part of the map.
This one would not heal.
I had tried to forgive him. I had sat in a cracked vinyl booth and listened to the story about loneliness and mistakes and the way my mother had cried. I had looked at the boy who once ma
