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The oven mitts. Even in my head, after all this time, I see the oven mitts first.

I've thought about this — why that's the image that sticks. I think it's because they were the most visible sign of the house's particular cruelty toward him, and the cruelty was dressed up so carefully as kindness. The mitts were protective. The mitts were necessary. The mitts were given to a child who could turn things to gold with his bare hands, and they were reasonable, and they were also the thing that ensured everyone who looked at him saw a problem to be managed before they saw a person.

We were both kept back, Orvell and I, but for opposite reasons. He was too valuable to risk. I was too volatile to trust. I've spent years thinking about which of those is worse and I keep arriving at the same place: both of them communicate the same thing, which is that you are not here as yourself, you are here as a function, and the function is currently suspended. The reasons are almost beside the point.

What I remember about Orvell, underneath the gold and the mitts, is the desperate brightness of him. The way he smiled for the cameras, which was real — it was always real, that was the thing, he wasn't performing it — and the way that brightness would dim slightly on the way back into the mansion when there were no cameras left to be bright for. He wanted to be out there. He wanted the missions, the action, the chance to be something other than a financier's asset and a very impressive party trick.

I don't know if he got there. I don't know if the seven years since I left gave him the chance to try, or whether the careful architecture of what he was built to be proved too solid to dismantle.

I never asked him, when I could have. I'd like to say I was protecting him from a question he couldn't answer, but the more honest version is that I was protecting myself from having to sit with the answer. If his life outside the mansion was also diminished, also contained, I didn't want to know. I had enough of my own diminishment to carry.

I'm going to ask him this time. That's the thing I'm deciding right now, on this train, writing this. I'm going to ask him how he is and actually wait for the real answer.