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I hated how much I liked it.

Not the part about being treated like I might stab him. That was humiliating, and I told him so, even if he only answered that trust would come in increments and there was no sense rushing something just because I was impatient.

It was everything around it that got me.

The way Adrien never made eating feel like something I had to hurry through before someone complained.

The way he noticed when I wanted another bite before I asked.

The way he would hold the glass while I drank and watch my face instead of his phone or the television or something more interesting, as though feeding me was not a chore he wanted finished as quickly as possible but something he had chosen to sit there and do.

And every time he said “good” afterward, warm and low and approving, I felt that same bewildering little pull somewhere deep down in my tummy.

I’m trying not to think about that part.

I had thought yesterday might become less confusing once I knew who Adrien was. And it did, at least in some ways. Because Adrien wasn’t just my kidnapper anymore; he was my dad’s friend. My dad’s best friend, even.

The man Dad trusted enough to give him his last request.

It’s hard to believe Dad would have looked at Adrien and thought, “Yes, this is the man I want to trust with my son,” if there wasn’t something worth trusting in him.

Dad wasn’t stupid.

He could be silly. And dramatic, according to Adrien.

Possibly willing to fight farm animals over military rations.

But not stupid.

Yesterday, Adrien showed me proof of all of that on his laptop.

He brought it into the room after dinner, sat beside me without asking, got close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and opened a folder full of photographs I had never seen.

There were so many.

Dad covered in dust with a pair of sunglasses pushed crookedly into his hair. Dad asleep in a chair, mouth hanging open. Dad standing beside men whose names Adrien supplied one by one—Garcia, Vasquez, Smith, Osbourne, Palinsky—until they stopped being strangers in military uniforms and became people who had known him in a life I had only ever imagined.

And Adrien was there too—younger, of course. His face was leaner, all cheekbones and dark eyebrows; his beard patchier; his hair shaved close to his scalp; and something about seeing him grin into a camera instead of looking severe and dangerous and forty was a little startling.

I knew, obviously, that Adrien had once been young, because people don’t simply emerge into the world at forty. Still, seeing evidence was different.

He and Dad had their arms thrown around each other in one photograph, both filthy up to the elbows, both smiling hard enough to squint against whatever sun was burning white behind the camera. Dad’s head was tipped toward Adrien’s shoulder. There was such easy affection between them that looking at it hurt in a way I couldn’t explain.

Adrien had been real to Dad.

Dad had been real to Adrien.

They had stood next to each other, laughed together, known the sound of each other’s voices, insulted one another over card games and food and terrible dancing.

Adrien knew a version of Dad that existed after bedtime stories and Saturday pancakes and before the folded flag.

And maybe because of that, I slept better last night than I expected.

Not well, but better.

Adrien helped me to the bathroom before bed, my hands restrained again as we walked down the hall because my cooperation throughout the day hadn’t magically erased the lamp incident from his memory. He kept one hand flat between my shoulder blades the whole way, and the other firmly around my bicep.

This time I knew what to expect, which somehow made the embarrassment both better and worse.