As I ran and the sun settled higher in the sky, I started to notice the now-familiar smells of the mornings. Smoke from wood fires were burning, boiling water to make the morning’s breakfast and tea or coffee.

I let my mind go and focused on what I knew already. I liked this work, but I wanted to do more at home. I wanted to work with LGBTQ+ youth. Children of immigrants and refugees who were trying to navigate life in the States and were probably struggling to blend those identities of who they were to their families and who they were inside. The only issue was telling my mother. Well, that and Elias, what I felt for him. Which by now I knew was not something that would just go away, and I still had no idea what to do about it. And I was scared of hurting my mom by taking the last tangible thing she had that connected her to my dad.

But I couldn’t keep that going at my own expense. Like I’d told Elias, it wasn’t fair to have all that on my shoulders. I had to do it. The mere thought of working in something different and closer to home made me feel lighter, and for the first time in days, I felt like I could take in a deep breath.

By the time I was about half a mile back to the hotel, the sun was up and I had my usual entourage of boys from the village running after me. I sprinted as far as I could for the last couple of hundred yards and doled out the stash of hard candy I had in my hoodie pocket to those who kept up to the end.

I stumbled into the courtyard and was doing some stretches before I noticed Elias had just run in as well. “Hey, I didn’t see you out there.”

He startled when he saw me and started moving toward the room, giving me a wide berth. “I went another way, a longer trail. We leave in an hour.”

Not a smile, not a wave. Nothing. He just left me standing there, and I completely deserved it.

Chapter 21

That afternoon we were getting in the car at the end of the day when Elias turned to me and asked, “Would you mind if we stop by one the houses we visited earlier this week? They’re just about twenty minutes out of the way. I want to drop something off.”

At this point I was so desperate to get any sort of approval from him that I automatically nodded. “Sure, no problem. Did we forget something there?”

“No, I have something for them.”

“Okay.” That was a pretty cryptic answer, but he didn’t seem like he was going to offer more information, so I just put my head back and closed my eyes for the ride.