I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed. Henry had told me that, in that measured, immutable way of his, like Moses descending the mountain with the word of God. ‘Stay in bed, Richard. You’ll make it worse if you don’t.’

But I couldn’t breathe in there. Not really. The air in Henry’s house clung to my lungs like velvet and ash. It was warm, yes—warm in that stifling way of a library sealed too long, where nothing living had passed through in weeks. The sort of warmth that chokes instead of comforts. And besides, I couldn’t sleep.

My thoughts had become a kind of fever in themselves—wild, recursive, looping back again and again to the same unbearable truth: I was not well, and I was alone.

At some point, in the haze of too many sleepless nights and half-swallowed pills, Henry told me I’d nearly died. Your temperature was 87 degrees when they brought you in, he’d said, peering over his glasses like a disappointed father. You could’ve gone into cardiac arrest. Slipped into a coma. You don’t know how close it was.

I did know. Not in any medical sense. But in that eerie, bone-deep way one knows when something essential has left the body and might not return.

I had been cold. Cold in a way I did not know a person could be. Cold beneath the skin, inside the teeth. Cold in the mind.

The house had been empty that evening. Henry had gone out—he always had somewhere to go, something to retrieve. Sometimes I suspected he simply couldn’t bear the act of sitting with me too long, as if my sickness might be catching. Or worse, dull.

So when the knock came at the door, I thought I’d imagined it.

Twice. Then silence. Then again—three, soft but insistent.

I moved before I thought. The floorboards under my feet felt foreign, as though I were trespassing in my own body. I shouldn’t have been upright. My vision pulsed at the edges. Every step felt like dragging myself across ice. And still—I went.

I remember opening the door.

And then—there they were.

God. Them.

They stood on the threshold, bundled in wool and worry, their eyes wide and full of that familiar, unbearable kindness. The sort of gaze that asked nothing of you but still saw too much.

I hadn’t seen them in weeks. Maybe longer. Time had collapsed into something viscous, like syrup, and I was stuck somewhere near the bottom of it.

But I remembered them. Of course I did.

They were the first person I met at Hampden. My first true conversation. My first cup of coffee in the dining hall. The first person who laughed at something I said and meant it. The person who sat beside me on the common room sofa that first Friday and said, “You don’t have to talk, I just didn’t want you to sit alone.”

They weren’t like the others.

Not like Henry with his exquisite detachment. Not like Bunny, loud and clumsy. Not like Francis, swaddled in cashmere and crises, or Camilla with her tragic beauty and distant smiles.

No—this person had never been part of that world. They had watched it from a distance. Cautious. Wary. Like someone watching a fire from across a field, uncertain if it was meant to warm or destroy.

And now they were here.

At Henry’s door, of all places.

Looking at me—as though I hadn’t become something unrecognizable. As though I were still just Richard. Still the boy from the dorm next to theirs. Still someone worth worrying about.

I couldn’t speak. I think I swayed a little.

And then—before I could say a single word—they stepped forward and pulled me into their arms.

It was the gentlest violence I’d ever known.

Their coat was cold against my skin. Their hands careful. My face pressed to the crook of their neck, where they still smelled faintly of soap and winter air. For a moment I forgot how tired I was. How sick. How lost.

I felt, absurdly, like crying.

Because in all the weeks of silence, of being studied like a specimen by the others, of having my body wrapped in blankets but never truly touched—no one had held me. Not once. Not until now.

Not until them.