His hands were empty. No suitcase. No duffel bag. Not even a backpack. Just his hands, shoved deep into his sleeves as if he were trying to tuck himself away from the world.
“This is Lucas,” Emma said, her voice too bright, too casual. She was trying to build a wall of normalcy around him, but I could hear the fear trembling underneath it.
Lucas glanced at me, a quick, careful look, before his eyes dropped to the floor again.
“Ma’am,” he said. The word was stiff, formal. Nobody says ‘ma’am’ anymore unless they’ve been trained by hardship or punished into politeness.
Something about the sight of him, so hollowed out and quiet, made my carefully constructed defenses crumble. He wasn’t a line item on a budget. He was a person. He was a child.
