Kate talked to him, and he wished she wouldn’t. It was just more sound. She stopped him when he tried to bite his hands, but she let him chew on his hoodie cords. What were they waiting for? Why were they still here?

Kate stood as a small group of people approached, but Charlie stayed sitting, head down and fingers and mouth occupied with his hoodie cords. He didn’t want to be noticed. He felt like he was going to explode, but the part of him that was capable of that had been burnt out years ago.

He heard his name mixed in with other words, spoken by a voice tinged with distress that only put him more on edge. Charlie’s eyes flicked up. Luke was back, and there was a man and a woman with him. Older, but not elderly. Upset. The woman’s eyes looked red and wet.

“Charlie—” Kate began to say as they turned towards him, but the other woman was already moving.

Close, too close, and then before Charlie could process what was happening he was confined in arms that felt too stiff, too unyielding. He wanted to scream and claw and bite, but instead he just tried to sink down in his chair to slip away. It didn’t work. The perfume the woman was wearing made his head hurt.

“He’s still a bit, uh… he might need a little space for a while, ma’am.” Kate had moved closer, hand extended towards them but not touching. “Charlie, you remember your grandparents?”

The body pressed against his retreated, and Charlie looked up at a face that should have been familiar but wasn’t really. He had probably been around eight when he’d last seen his grandmother. It was half a lifetime ago.

He did remember them, though, as a set of events and incidents.

He remembered the cricket game his grandpa has taken him to, the noise of the crowd and the overwhelming smell of food. He remembered how he'd cried and tried to crawl under his seat until his grandpa had picked him up and carried him out of the stadium while he screamed and flailed because he didn't want to be touched.

He remembered Christmas dinners where his grandma fussed at him to try new foods, then fussed at him some more when he picked even the things he did like apart. He remembered his mum desperately trying to play peacemaker, to calm him with every trick she knew, and he remembered how it had always ended in tears despite her best efforts.

He hadn’t liked them and he hadn’t given them any reason to like him. Why were they here? Why was there hugging and crying?

“Charlie,” Kate said, and he realised he hadn’t been listening again. “Your grandparents are going to take you home with them now. Okay?”

Charlie wanted to ask why, but instead he just nodded. He wasn’t sure it was a good thing, but it was an answer to the problem of where he would go. He needed that.

He didn’t sleep in the car, but he did shut his eyes and let his head loll to the side and pretend. His grandmother sat with him in the back, her hand stroking down his arm repeatedly. He didn’t want to be touched, but he knew if he opened his mouth what would come out wouldn’t be a polite request. He doubted it would even be words.

There had been a vague map of his grandparents’ house in his mind, pieced together from various memories, but he felt no familiarity as he was led through it. The broad landscape of it was the same, but it was too faded in his memory for anything to really click.

The room at the end of the hall was the guest room, now his room, and as soon as he was led into it he took the opportunity to leave his grandma’s side and bury himself under the thick blanket on the large bed.

“Yes, I suppose you would be tired,” his grandma said from the doorway. A moment of silence stretched. She didn’t move. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Charlie. Sleep well.”

It wasn’t until the door clicked shut behind her that Charlie allowed himself a long exhale. These people may as well have been strangers to him. Everything was different. He didn’t know how to live this life.

All he wanted now was to sleep, to rest in the only way he could when everything was so confusing and uncertain. He was definitely tired enough. His brain was too exhausted to form coherent thought, but also too overstimulated to properly settle. It jumped around erratically, replaying tiny slices of different things that had happened that day. Gradually the memories fragmented and he finally drifted off to sleep.