The angel liked the mornings best. The sun came through the dayroom windows in long bars and lay across the floor, and Will Thorne had come to like the mornings too, because the mornings were when it sat with him, and when it sat with him he wasn't afraid.
It never came in the dark. Will had noticed that early and held onto it, because it seemed to matter. Whatever else the thing was, it wasn't hiding. It sat in the daylight where anybody could have looked at it, if anybody else could have seen it, and it let him look as long as he wanted.
It didn't have wings. No robe, no gold, none of what the Sunday-school pictures had promised. It looked like a man. That was the trouble. It looked almost exactly like a man, close enough that Will's eye kept trying to settle and kept sliding off, the way you can't quite look at your own face in a photograph and see what other people see. Something in it was too smooth. Too rested. A face put together by someone who'd studied faces a long time and gotten every part right and still left out whatever it is that makes a real one. The small crookedness. The wear. Will could never say what was missing. He only knew it was, and that the missing thing scared him worse than wings would have.
Nobody else ever noticed it. Will used to think that was because it had come for him and nobody else, the way you'd tell yourself a thing to make it bearable. But there was another way to read it, the one the doctors would have reached for, and he kept that one too. He kept it folded up small in the same place he kept everything else. A man in his position couldn't afford to throw any explanation away, not even the ones he hated.
"You were dreaming about her again," the angel said. Soft. It always said the worst things soft, which was something Will wouldn't understand the size of until much later. "Dianne."