“I’m not like he is, you know,” he tells me, but that isn’t the part that stirs my cold, dead heart. It’s the words he follows it up with a second later, as though it barely takes him anything to let them out: “So if you want to run, run. I won’t sit on the side-lines and wait for you to slip away, like you never existed.” He pauses, thickly. Takes a second, in a way I can understand. “I’ll fight for you, El. I’ll always fight for you.”