A week later, Dylan showed up at my office building at lunchtime. Security called me first; I watched him on the camera feed for a moment—the way he kept shifting his weight, the way his hands wouldn’t find a pocket. I had a choice. I could tell them to send him away—which would have been right and even easy. Or I could go down and draw the line where he could see it. I pressed the elevator button.
He was thinner. He smiled the old smile and then seemed to remember the new rules. “Hi,” he said. His eyes were sober. “Hi,” I said back. We stood like that until the lobby echoed with our silence.
“I brought you something,” he said finally, holding out a key on a lanyard I recognized—black with white lettering: CROSSROADS RESIDENT. “Found it in a box I hadn’t unpacked. Figured it didn’t belong to me anymore.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. He started to say more and then didn’t. Progress is sometimes just a halted sentence.
“I got a job,” he said instead. “It’s not flashy. But it’s honest.”
“Honest beats flashy every day,” I said. “Keep it.” His face changed—something unclenched.