The part of me that had been trained by years of pain was harder to convince.
I made myself lift my head. Not all the way. Not with the kind of ease that would have come naturally to someone who hadn't spent half a decade learning that being seen was dangerous. But I lifted it enough to look at the path ahead rather than the ground and I held it there and I focused on breathing.
He said nothing.
But I felt something shift slightly in his posture behind me, a small and almost imperceptible change in the way he was sitting, and I understood that he had seen what I did and what I did after and was noting both without making it into a moment I had to respond to.
That was something I was still getting used to. The way he noticed things and didn't immediately make them into something I had t
