Parks.
Places where the meetings slowly stopped feeling like appointments.
I kept waiting for the teenager everyone had warned me about.
The angry one.
The destructive one.
The boy who had somehow caused ten families to give up on him.
That version of Luke never appeared.
He was guarded.
That much was obvious.
You could feel the wall around him.
Every week, he seemed to watch carefully to see whether I would show up again.
But underneath the caution, he was kind.
Quietly kind.
And he remembered everything.
One afternoon, I casually mentioned that Grace had hated raisins.
The words slipped out before I even realized I had spoken about her.
Usually, people became uncomfortable when I mentioned my children.
Luke simply nodded.
Three weeks later, we were sitting in a café when he pushed a cookie toward me.
“Don’t worry,” he said without looking up from his book. “I checked. No raisins.”
