Danny found me at my locker on a Monday, which hadn't happened in weeks, and the first thing I noticed was how much smaller he looked doing it — shoulders drawn in, the specific posture of someone crossing a distance they weren't sure they were still allowed to cross.
"Hey," he said. "Got a sec?"
"Yeah. What's up?"
He glanced down the hall, toward the spot where Josh and Avesh used to stand with the rest of the group before school, a spot that had, I noticed for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, stopped including me entirely without my ever quite registering the moment it happened.
"It's Ivan," Danny said. "His grandma passed last week. Funeral's Saturday. I know things have been weird with all of us, but I figured — I don't know. Figured you'd want to know. He always liked you a lot, man, even after everything."
The words landed somewhere I hadn't braced for. I remembered Ivan's grandmother distantly, from a different life — a small, sharp-tongued woman who used to slip us extra food whenever we came over, who called all four of us "her boys" without distinction, who scolded Josh once, memorably, for putting his elbows on her good tablecloth and then fed him twice as much dessert as everyone else out of what I'd always suspected was a kind of contrarian affection. In my old life, she'd died years before I ever got the chance to properly say goodbye, because I'd been too busy with work to visit as often as I should have, and I remembered, with a fresh, unwelcome sharpness, exactly how much that particular regret had cost me at the time — one more thing on the long list of ordinary kindnesses I'd let slip through my fingers while telling myself there'd always be more time later.
There hadn't been, the first time. I remembered standing at her graveside once before, in another body, another decade, wearing a suit I'd bought specifically for the occasion and feeling, even then, that the grief arrived a little too late to mean what it should have. I hadn't expected to be given a second chance to get this particular regret right, and standing in that hallway, I understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with hypnosis or empires or masks, that this was exactly the kind of second chance worth actually taking.
It struck me, standing there with my locker still half-open and the hallway noise washing past us in the ordinary way it always did, how strange it was that this particular grief could still find me at all, given everything else I'd built and buried and rebuilt since waking up in this body. I had a lockbox of cash and a Glock under my bed, an empire built out of hypnotized fighters and dark-web negotiations, a mask with a purple-flecked edge — and none of it had blunted the specific, old ache of a kind old woman's kitchen, or the guilt of having let a version of that same kindness slip away once already without ever properly saying thank you for it.
"I didn't know," I said. "Thank you for telling me."
"Yeah. Well." Danny shifted his weight, clearly unsure whether he'd get an answer he wanted, backpack straps twisted in his hands the way they always got when he was nervous about something, a small, familiar tell I hadn't realized I still remembered until I saw it again. "You gonna come?"
I thought about it longer than the question probably deserved — not because I doubted whether I wanted to go, but because I understood exactly how much showing up would cost me in a currency I'd been rationing carefully for months. Every hour spent as Damian, uncomplicated and present, was an hour not spent building the thing that actually kept my family safe, kept Emma safe, kept the porcelain mask's warning at bay. But some things, I was starting to relearn the hard way, didn't respect that kind of accounting no matter how carefully you tried to run it.
"I'll be there," I said.
Danny's face did something complicated — relief, mostly, but underneath it something more cautious, the look of a person who'd learned not to fully trust a promise from me anymore. "Cool. Yeah. That's — cool." He hesitated a beat longer. "Can I ask you something? And you don't gotta answer if it's weird."
"Go ahead."
"Did we do something? Like, all of us. You just kind of — stopped being around, and none of us really know why, and it felt shitty to bring it up 'cause it's not like you owe us an explanation, but Ivan especially, man. He used to talk about you all the time. Still kind of does, actually, even now."
I stood there in the hallway, backpack heavy on one shoulder, and felt the specific, quiet ache of a question I'd been avoiding answering even to myself for months. The truth — that I'd drifted because staying close to any of them meant risking exactly the kind of slip Emma had already caught me in, meant a hundred small opportunities for someone who used to know me well enough to notice something was wrong — wasn't a truth Danny could carry any better than Emma could have.
"You guys didn't do anything," I said instead, and meant it, which surprised me a little. "I've had a lot going on. Family stuff, business stuff. It wasn't ever about you guys. I should've said something instead of just going quiet. That's on me."
"You could still say something. Now, I mean."
I looked at him — genuinely looked, the way I'd stopped doing with most people who weren't useful to whatever I was currently building — and felt something old and almost forgotten stir underneath all the careful management I'd built my second life around. Danny had never once asked me for anything. Not money, not favors, not access to whatever I'd been building. Just this. Just an explanation, or the absence of one, offered without demand.
"I'll try to be better about it," I said. "Starting with Saturday."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He smiled, the first real smile I'd gotten off any of them in weeks, and clapped me once on the shoulder before heading off down the hall, and I stood there a moment longer, watching him go, feeling the specific weight of a bridge I hadn't realized I still had the option to rebuild.
Saturday came grey and cold, the kind of morning that seemed to arrive specifically for occasions like this one, and I stood at the edge of the cemetery in the one dark suit I owned that wasn't cut for a masquerade, watching a small crowd gather around a casket considerably smaller than the woman's presence had ever felt in the room she used to fill.
Ivan looked older than I remembered him looking even a few months ago — not in any way that showed on his face, exactly, more in the way he held himself, shoulders drawn in against a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. He hugged me longer than either of us probably meant to when I found him near the back of the small crowd, and didn't ask a single question about where I'd been, and I felt, in the specific, wordless pressure of that hug, an entire apology pass between us that neither of us had the vocabulary to say out loud.
I remembered, holding him there, a hundred smaller moments from a life he had no idea I'd already lived once before — Sunday dinners at his grandmother's table, the specific creak of her back porch steps, the way she used to press an extra plate on anyone who so much as glanced at the stove twice. None of that history existed for the boy standing in front of me now, not really, not in any form he could access. It existed only in me, one more private grief I had no way of sharing with the one person who might have understood it best.
"She always liked you," he said quietly, once we'd separated, wiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand in a way that made it clear he wasn't going to acknowledge doing it. "Used to ask about you even after you kind of disappeared on us. Said you had 'old eyes.' Never really got what she meant by that until, I don't know. Recently, I guess."
I didn't have a good answer for that, so I didn't try to find one. "Old eyes" was, in its own strange way, the truest thing anyone in this life had ever said about me without knowing it, and hearing it repeated back through a grieving teenager's grief felt like being seen and unseen in the exact same breath. I just stood beside him through the rest of the service, Josh and Avesh and Danny gathered close on his other side, the five of us reassembled for an hour in a configuration none of us had occupied together in months, and felt something in my chest loosen that I hadn't fully realized had been clenched shut since the day I'd first started pulling away from all of them.
Avesh found me in the kitchen a little later, quieter than the rest of them, refilling a cup of lemonade from a pitcher that had clearly been someone's grandmother's for decades. "She used to call me 'the tall one who eats like a bird,'" he said, apropos of nothing, a small, sad smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Never once got my actual name right. I loved that about her, weirdly."
"That sounds like her."
"Yeah." He looked at me a moment, something searching in the look. "It's good you came, man. For real. Ivan needed the full crew today, not just some of it."
Afterward, at the small gathering held in Ivan's aunt's house, Danny cornered me by the food table with two paper plates and a look that suggested he'd been building up to a question all day.
"You gonna keep coming around?" he asked. "Or was this a one-time thing?"
"I'm gonna try," I said. "I mean it this time."
"Yeah, well." He handed me one of the plates, unprompted, the same easy generosity he'd always shown without ever making a production of it. "Trying's a start, I guess."
Josh found me near the door as people started filtering out, holding two cans of soda he'd clearly grabbed on autopilot, and handed me one without ceremony, the same easy gesture he'd been making toward me since we were both in elementary school. "Feels weird, all of us being in the same room again," he said. "Good weird. Just weird."
"Yeah."
"You gonna actually stick around this time, or is this a one-week thing?" There was no real edge to it, just the blunt honesty Josh had always specialized in, the kind that used to annoy me in my old life and now, somehow, felt like exactly the kind of honesty I'd been missing.
"I'm gonna try," I said, and heard myself say it for the second time that day, and understood that I was going to have to actually mean it this time, in a way that cost me something, or the promise wasn't going to survive contact with everything else pulling at my schedule.
He studied me a moment, the way he used to study a play before deciding whether to run it, and then nodded, apparently satisfied enough for now. "Alright. I'm holding you to it."
I understood, standing in a cold cemetery and then a warm, crowded kitchen beside four boys who used to be my whole world in a life that no longer applied, that some doors stayed open a great deal longer than I'd been giving people credit for — and that the ones I'd been most afraid to walk back through were, more often than not, the ones that had never actually closed.