His mother was softer, but not soft enough to break the line. She stroked his hair when he had a fever, brought him orange soda when he was a child, but in the serious things she always stood a little behind. Right where the women of a generation had learned to stand. Beside pain, never in front of it. As if their work was to wipe it up afterward, not to stop it.

Adrian grew up in a neighborhood that had only two seasons. Summer, and waiting for the next summer. Apartment buildings with faded balconies, bent antennas, dogs barking at night at things no one could see, and taverns that smelled of grilled meat, cheap wine, and men’s lives spent before they were ever properly named