THE PRICE OF LETTING GO
Just a slow, physical release, the kind you only notice because you had been bracing against it without realizing how long you had been bracing.
I let go of his hand.
He looked at me, startled, like he thought I was leaving.
“You don’t need my hand for this part,” I said quietly. “This part isn’t mine to hold.”
He looked back at his father.
For the first time since I had known him, Dominic Hartley did not have a single word ready.
He just nodded. Once. And let his father cross the room and sit down on the floor beside him, an old man in a wet coat lowering himself onto worn carpet he had avoided for fifteen years, and put one hand flat on his son’s back, and said nothing else at all.