Denver

Denver is a recurring point of arrival, memory, and pressure in the story: Colton reaches Colorado after fleeing the conversion camp and is taken into juvenile custody, while Marcel remembers Denver from childhood and later settles nearby in Fairfield with Brad. The city’s changing meaning links escape and institutional vulnerability to adult independence, work, education, and the question of where a chosen life can be built.

Setting and Earlier Memories

Marcel’s first experience of Colorado came during a handful of months when his father was guest-lecturing at a university in Denver. The city left him with an uneven set of memories. He visited an art museum, but its sculptures were behind barriers and could not be touched; at the aquarium, a tide pool offered something he could enjoy. These encounters register the practical limits imposed by his low vision without reducing his memory of the place to disability alone.

Other memories were domestic and familial. His mother took him shopping, while the family ate out because she liked working in soil but not handling raw meat. Antoine took up skiing, an activity Marcel did not feel brave enough to try: navigating with low vision already felt difficult, and he did not want another reason for people to treat him as helpless. Denver therefore enters his history as both an accessible-enough setting for family life and a place where public expectations about his vulnerability shaped what he felt able to do.

Arrival and Life Near the City

When Marcel returned as an adult, the city was at once familiar and changed. He had money in his bank account and independence within reach, but his home was not in Denver itself: Brad had signed a lease for a townhouse in Fairfield, described as a small town just outside the city. Its narrow streets, grass along the pavement, six steps to the front door, and ten more up to the living room made the place concrete in Marcel’s new daily geography. The house stood on a main bus route that ran into the middle of Denver and around its edges, while remaining far enough from traffic for Marcel to drink coffee on the upstairs balcony without hearing it.

The location connected Marcel to the city without making the city his whole world. Denver offered the urban center around which the couple’s new home and routines were organized; Fairfield offered a quieter domestic setting, with public transit as a link between them. That arrangement also sits beside Marcel’s earlier experience of moving through cities without many contacts or reliable backup: settling near Denver was a substantial choice, not an effortless return to a place he already knew.

Colton’s Arrival and Precarity

Denver also lies at the end of Colton’s flight from the conversion camp. He ran barefoot in the middle of winter, traveled by bus as far as Arizona, and then hitchhiked into Colorado before police caught him and took him to juvenile detention. By the time he was sitting in a cold holding area, he had spent four weeks on the road. His bag, shoes, socks, and sweater had been taken from him, leaving him in a thin T-shirt and torn jeans beneath air-conditioning that made the stone-bench waiting area colder still.

The distance he crossed did not immediately become safety. Colton prayed as he sat in the cell, trying to let his anger fade, but his thoughts still carried the camp’s account of him: he imagined that something otherworldly had burrowed under his skin and made him flee the people and institution supposedly able to make him well. Father Benson’s language of burning away infected parts remained with him even after he had escaped. Colorado marks a change of place and custody, but the beliefs and fear imposed on him did not vanish at the state line.

His later placement at Ted House brought him into a more supportive environment, though its age limit made security feel temporary. As his eighteenth birthday and high-school graduation approached, Colton dreaded being turned out with only a backpack, despite Sage’s assurances that he would not be abandoned. He had spent less time in foster care and group homes than many other young people, yet still struggled to believe that a family-like home would last. Denver is thus associated not only with arrival but with the institutional timetable that put housing and the prospect of adulthood under pressure.

Work, Education, and Institutional Barriers

The city’s educational and economic possibilities become another source of strain. Colton’s financial-aid application for veterinary school was denied because the system did not consider him independent: his parents had never legally lost custody, so their income was counted despite his time in foster care. The award letter arrived among bills, and the explanation arrived just as water began pouring through his apartment ceiling. He saved his laptop, phone, file folder, and backpack, but much else was lost. The linked shocks left him with an immediate practical problem—where to go—and a longer one, whether the future he wanted was financially possible.

A community-college route seemed cheaper, but affordability on paper did not equal money Colton possessed. Full-time tuition was thirty-two hundred dollars; the proposed plan required a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deposit followed by payments just under a thousand dollars each month for three months. For someone whose account balance was already claimed by bills, even the lower-cost option remained a barrier. His situation shows how the formal category of dependency could override the lived reality of having been placed in care, while the cost of education narrowed the choices available to him.

Marcel’s work history gives a parallel, though different, account of barriers to economic independence. Brad had seen Marcel rejected from jobs he was qualified to do because employers did not know how to accommodate him, and watched studios reduce his teaching hours until he was working only one class a week because students were uncomfortable with his blindness. Brad understood the discrimination Marcel faced, but still held Marcel’s difficulty finding work against him. Their move to the Denver area consequently carried unequal stakes: for Marcel, relocation meant a chance to begin again, but did not erase the employment barriers that followed him.

Family Pull and the Meaning of Home

Denver remains a route by which Marcel’s family tries to reach him. Antoine texted that he would be in the city for a couple of days and asked to see Marcel. Marcel suspected that the work trip was a pretext, created to reassure their parents by checking up on him and to draw Marcel back into his brother’s involvement in his life. The message stirred anxiety and anger before Marcel had answered; he set the phone aside while Colton quietly noticed his distress.

When Marcel and Antoine spoke, Marcel said that he had told his brother about Colton living with him and about their relationship. Antoine nevertheless thought he should move back to San Francisco. Marcel’s answer was clear: he did not want to return, and there was nothing there for him. His choice to remain near Denver is not presented as an escape from every difficulty, or as proof that independence means having no need for others. He has already said that living with Colton helps, but that he chose the relationship because he could be on his own, not because fear of solitude compelled him to keep Colton close. In that contrast, Denver and its surroundings become the setting for a deliberately chosen home: one shaped by mobility and constraint, but no longer dictated by family pressure or by the assumption that disability, poverty, or past harm must decide where a person belongs.