I did not tell him that night.
Not because I was afraid. The old reflex — protecting against being wrong, against the floor dropping out, against good things turning out to be temporary — was there, faintly, the way habits persist in the part of you that learned them first. But it was not the reason I was quiet.
The reason was simpler: I wanted to be certain. Not about the warmth — the warmth was as certain as anything I had felt through the bloodline, the specific quality of something that had always been going to happen and had arrived on its own schedule. I wanted to hold it alone for one night. Not hide it. Just — know it, by myself, before it belonged to both of us.
I sat on the roof in the dark after he went inside and I held the knowledge the way you hold something fragile — not
