The boy never really understood their reactions. He was fine. Nothing had happened. But he was just a boy. He couldn’t know how scary having a child could be, knowing there’s a piece of yourself out in the world that you can protect only with warnings and rules that could be ignored and broken; knowing that the connecting nerves are so long, any message of distress would take an eternity to reach its way back to you; feeling pain at the expectation of agony.
