Wystan lived above a little bakery on Briarbell Street, where the morning smelled of warm rolls, bus smoke, and rain on stone.

He was a boy with a smile that arrived before his words, not a noisy grin, but a small bright curve that made people feel he had saved them a place beside him.

His mother, Rowena, said his smile was like opening a curtain, though she also reminded him that curtains could not fix every dark room.

One Monday, as Wystan carried a paper bag of buns to school, rain began falling from a sky that had no clouds at all. It did not fall everywhere. It fell in tidy little showers over certain heads: over a man staring at his shoes, over a woman gripping a cold coffee, and over old Aoife at the flower stall, whose violets trembled under a cloud no wider than a hat. Wystan looked down at his own dry sleeves and saw that not a single drop had touched him.