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Look at me now, Dom used to think, imagining his parents gawking at the penthouse apartment, the designer clothes, the parties, all somehow without filling in the blanks of what he'd had to do between the day they kicked him out of the house and the night two years later when he got into the back of Frederick's car.
The sentiment has softened lately, the way everything seems to in the damp and crumbling grandeur of the Pike, when he's tucked away in a quiet corner with his nursing school notes and one of Otis's rats curled up asleep in the crook of his arm, a phone number in his pocket that he plans to call tomorrow.
Sometime between tea with Mrs. Paige in the wild, creeping garden and sliding into his seat at the kitchen table when the boss gets home safe at two a.m., it's only a vague feeling, barely worth pinning down: a flicker of sadness that wherever they are, his parents probably don't have it in them to understand how good he has it here.