“His face changed. The curiosity remained, but something else surfaced beneath it — a hope so fierce and so fragile that it made my chest ache with a pain I had not expected and did not want. He had been alone. He had known he was different. And the idea that there were others like him — that he was not the only one, that somewhere in the vast, indifferent machinery of the world there were people who shared his blood and his biology and who might, possibly, want him — that idea landed on his face like sunlight on water: a sudden, transformative illumination.”