Chapter 20: The Maternal Aura
Another month passed. Uriel had, by now, made his peace with the daily shape of things.
He'd stopped keeping track of the whole friends thing. Two lifetimes of friendships formed and lost and never properly appreciated had given him a realistic view of the category. At this stage in his life, the presence or absence of them registered about equally.
He also wasn't particularly idle.
Academically, history and geography needed rebuilding from scratch — some parts matched what he remembered — monsoon climates, karst terrain, that sort of thing — but the differences needed proper study. Everything else he handled on autopilot. Sometimes the teacher would still be working through a concept and he'd have already finished the next three problems, closed his notebook, and settled in to wait for the bell.
The rest of his life he assessed, on quiet evenings, with the methodical detachment of a man filing a report on himself.
Breakfast, waiting on the nightstand before he woke. Seasonal clothes, rotated and refolded into the wardrobe without announcement. The cuffs he never scrubbed well enough, quietly redone and returned. On days he slept badly, the cloth bundle would contain something extra — some kind of tonic, apparently good for focus. On days with heavy coursework, a cup of tea would appear on his desk at the exact right moment, as though someone had been watching the clock.
He ran through the list, item by item, and arrived at his conclusion.
He was one step away from being spoon-fed. He had, in all meaningful ways, become a kept man.
He exhaled, picked up the tea — perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold — and drank it.
You get used to it. That's the thing. You just get used to it.
---
It happened on an ordinary afternoon, for no particular reason except that he was hungry.
Third period ended and the smell drifted through the corridor window — bread, baked with something savoury inside, warm enough to carry from a distance. He hadn't planned to do anything about it. Then he was outside and moving toward the source before he'd consciously made the decision.
There was a cart vendor not far from the academy gates. Hot sausage rolls, the kind that had been on his short list of personally-initiated activities since he enrolled. He bought two, took one in each hand, and turned back toward the dormitory through the side corridor that ran past the teaching block.
Then he stopped.
Two people stood in the middle of the corridor, facing each other.
One of them was Tina, back toward him, silver hair catching the late-afternoon light.
The other was a boy. Same year as Uriel, different class — recognisable, not the type who went out of his way to be noticed, but present enough that people knew his name. He was standing very straight. Shoulders rigid. Chin angled slightly down. And in his eyes, directed at Tina, was an expression Uriel had catalogued across approximately a thousand episodes of every coming-of-age story he'd ever consumed in his previous life.
The particular look of someone who has decided. Who has rehearsed. Who is about to say the thing they came to say.
The confession stance. Unmistakable.
Uriel's sausage roll compressed slightly in his grip. He eased sideways, pressed himself into the wall at the corridor's edge, and watched from behind the corner with one eye.
We were classmates. Just classmates. And you're out here trying to become my STEPDAD?! The hell is wrong with you?!
He held his breath and waited.
The boy opened his mouth. Said something — Uriel was too far to hear it, only caught the movement of his lips. A few words. Stop. A pause. More words. He had the rhythm of someone composing and deleting a message in real time, drafting and scrapping and starting again.
Tina stood and waited for him to finish.
Then, after a moment, she spoke.
"Are you all right?"
Her voice carried down the corridor at its usual pitch — gentle, with a slight downward curve to it. The tone of someone who has noticed something is wrong and wants to know what.
"Is something the matter?"
The boy blinked.
"Are you feeling unwell?"
She added it without a pause, and the concern in her voice was exactly the kind Uriel had known since before he could remember. Not the concern of classmates. Not the polished social warmth of someone performing interest. Just the plain, unconditional, load-bearing kind.
The boy stood very still.
Then he sniffed.
Then he turned around and ran.
The corridor went quiet. Tina stood where she was, head tilted slightly, watching the retreating figure until it disappeared.
Uriel peeled himself off the wall and walked over.
"Sis — I mean, Mom," he said, pulling up beside her. "What just happened."
Tina turned, saw him, and her expression softened into a smile. "Little Uri, you went shopping."
"Yeah." He held out the undamaged sausage roll. "What did he say?"
"Nothing," she said, taking it. "He just left."
"Before he left."
"Before that, also nothing, really."
Uriel replayed the scene in his head. The rigid posture. Those eyes. The lips moving for a full minute and a half.
"Mom," he said carefully. "What do you think was wrong with him?"
Tina took a bite of the sausage roll and considered, cheeks slightly full.
"Maybe he was homesick?" she said.
Three seconds of silence.
"And what does that have to do with you."
"He might have seen me," she said thoughtfully, "and thought of his own mother."
"..."
He bit into his sausage roll and said nothing.
I genuinely do not think that is what he was thinking. At all. Not even close.
---
The next day, passing the corridor near the boys' dormitory, Uriel caught voices — several of them, low but bouncing off the walls in that way enclosed spaces do.
"You said you were going to confess. How did it go—"
Laughter under the words. The easy cruelty of people who haven't failed yet.
"Come on, you walked over there like you were going to rescue her from Uriel and everything—"
"Drop it." That voice was different. Quieter. Something raw in it. "I was wrong. Let it go."
"How did it even fail, though—"
Silence.
Then: "I don't know how to explain it."
The voice was slow. Careful. The cadence of someone describing something they genuinely hadn't worked out yet.
"I was standing in front of her, and I had everything ready, and then the feeling just... went. I looked at her and I just felt like I was standing in front of my mom. And then—"
"And then?"
"Then I really wanted my mom," he said. "So I ran."
Two seconds of absolute silence. Then the corridor erupted — laughter, overlapping voices, someone wheezing, someone repeating the last line in disbelief.
Uriel stood outside in the hallway and listened to all of it.
He thought about what Tina had said. Maybe he was homesick.
He held the two things side by side, looked at them, arrived at a conclusion, and decided the conclusion was not worth examining any further.
He kept walking.
---
It happened again.
Uriel had the privilege of watching the second incident from start to finish, at close range, by the edge of the sports field.
The boy had gotten partway through his sentence when Tina tilted her head and raised one hand. She placed it on top of his head — light, unhurried, the same pressure Uriel had known since he was five — and held it there for a moment.
"It's okay to miss home," she said. "Being away at your age is really brave, you know that?"
"Your mother is definitely missing you."
A beat.
"And I'm sure she's proud of you."
The boy stood motionless for a few seconds. Then his eyes went red at the edges. Then, with no warning at all — the way a thread snaps when the tension has been building too long and someone touches it with the lightest possible hand — he started crying. Properly. The kind that involved everything—shoulders shaking, face crumpling, the works.
Uriel, standing at the field's edge, watched the entire sequence, took a careful step back, and became very interested in a point on the wall to his left.
---
That evening, Tina came by the room to drop off his laundry. She set it on the chair and didn't leave immediately — pulled up the spare stool and sat down.
"Mom saw something today," she said. "Something Mom thought was good."
"Mm."
"Being here with little Uri," she said, resting her chin in her hand, watching him with a look he couldn't quite name, "and getting to watch him grow up alongside everyone else. Mom thinks that's a good thing."
Uriel stopped turning the page. He looked at her.
Grow up independently. Right. Like the laundry she did, the breakfasts she made, and the notes she left in the margins. Very independent.
He didn't say it.
"The boy today," she continued. "He cried."
"I know. I saw."
"Little Uri wouldn't do that."
"Why not."
"Because Mom is right here."
"..."
"And," she added, "little Uri has always been more capable than he thinks. More self-sufficient. Even without Mom around, you'd manage just fine."
Uriel looked at the page in front of him. The words had stopped making sense in the ordinary way.
Capable. Self-sufficient. Would manage fine without her.
He made a decision, quickly and quietly, not to follow that chain of logic any further. He had enough presence of mind to know it would only get more complicated at the end.
"Yeah. Got it."
"Little Uri worked hard today," Tina said, standing and giving his shoulder a brief pat. "Sleep early."
"I'm still reading."
"Read, then sleep early. Tomorrow's breakfast will have an extra egg. For energy."
The balcony door clicked shut behind her.
Uriel just sat there, staring blankly at the closed door. The phrase "for stamina" began doing a taunting little tap dance inside his brain. He found his page again.
He read two lines. Stopped.
There was something he'd noticed, and he might as well name it.
---
The next day, the jealousy levels among the boys had climbed again.
He hadn't done anything. He hadn't said anything. But two people had walked up to Tina and both of them had retreated — one running, one crying — and Uriel was still Uriel. Still getting the morning bundle. Still walking alongside her. Nothing interrupted, nothing reduced.
Someone passed him in the corridor. Didn't bump him this time — just looked. A single, sharp, sustained look, the kind he recognised from both of his lives.
The specific texture of why you and not me.
Uriel met it for a moment, then looked away and kept walking.
Why me?
I genuinely don't know.