When you cared too much about one person, other people seemed to matter less, and sometimes you treated them as if they did not matter at all.

He saw that they were fitting back into their usual roles, Elliot making children cry and and Luke comforting them. He had enjoyed being the nice one, the one who could afford to be kind. It was easy to be generous, when you had something to give. He missed being happy.

Everyone else noticed him. Nobody could help but notice him. He didn't know how to get people to love him, but he knew how to bang on the door of people's attention, lean on their bell until they answered in the vain hope he would go away. He knew how to be inescapably irritating. But the one person he had learned it for was the one person it didn't work on. He barely existed to his father, insubstantial as the dust in his room, only there because nobody cared he was.

(...) gold and pearl and flesh and blood, storybook strange and known by heart.

That was love: Elliot couldn’t command it, couldn’t demand it. He could only leave the chill echoing place where it was not.

And he did not want to be loved as a second choice, as a surrender. He had spent his whole life not being loved at all, and he had thought being loved enough would satisfy him. It would not. He did not want to be loved enough. He wanted to be loved overwhelmingly. (...) He had never been chosen, so he had never had a chance to know this about himself before now: he wanted to be chosen first.