That conversation happened on a rainy October night when Max was fifteen. The city outside Rachel’s apartment windows was a blur of wet neon and traffic, the kind of chill drizzle that slipped under collars and settled in bones. Inside, though, it was warm.
A pot of chili simmered on the stove. A stack of graded essays sat on Rachel’s small dining table. Max’s backpack lay open on the floor, a math textbook fanned out beside a pair of oversized sneakers.
He lay sideways on her thrift-store couch, his long legs dangling over the arm, dark hair falling into his eyes as he watched her. The lanky little boy who had once fit neatly in her arms had grown into a teenager, all sharp angles and restless energy, but his eyes were the same—wide, earnest, searching. “Say it again,” he’d insisted, after she’d finished telling him about the fire for what had to be the hundredth time.
She’d smiled, stirring the pot, pretending she didn’t know exactly which part he wanted. “You saved me,” he said, repeating his childhood line. “We saved each other,” Rachel answered, gently correcting him, just as she always did.
“That’s what people do when they’re brave enough. They save each other.”
Now he lay there, watching her with a look that made her throat tighten. Fifteen was a complicated age.
Half child, half man, half defiant independence and half invisible fear. He was too old to curl into her side the way he used to and too young to understand that sometimes, just being willing to stay in a room with someone when things were hard was its own kind of courage. “Do you really believe that?” he asked quietly.
“That people save each other?”
She turned off the stove and crossed the room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She sat in the chair across from the couch so she could see him clearly. There were faint acne scars starting along his jaw.
A small burn mark on his wrist from a science experiment gone wrong. A new callus on his thumb from endlessly tossing a basketball. “I have evidence,” she said, tilting her head toward him.
“You, standing at that podium at the community center dedication when you were seven, telling a room full of adults that I saved you and then I saved your dad. Your dad walking away from meetings to show up for your school plays now. The kids who come to the after-school program at the center and then turn around and volunteer there when they’re older.
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