You got no kinda idea what my life is like, he thought sadly. How that might change things once Malcolm sorted that out, he didn't know.

"Harlan ain't a place where you survive without learnin' how to hide the soft spots." He'd learned young; he'd been doing it his whole life. That didn't mean, of course, that there weren't soft spots there. "Even then, you gotta watch out for someone takin' a shot at you, one way or another." And he was happy to extend that watch here, that self protection over Malcolm and Henry and Neal. He couldn't just watch people flap in the wind that didn't deserve it.

"You're not maintenance," he assured, thumb brushing back and forth over the small of Malcolm's back. "You're self reliant, smart, self aware.. and that last one is rarer than you think, considering how much you've suffered." Considering the situation Life had put him in. "It's okay to be in broken pieces. That's not your fault."