“I don’t know everything that went on.” Tom looked down as he spoke, maybe unaccustomed to talking so much. “We both ran away, we were both pretty lost. But I know he was over there with you. I know you were happy, and I know that something happened, and then you weren’t.”

“No.” Theo thought about the long years, the marriage, trying again and again to be someone he could never, ever be. “I was not.”

“I’m not going to tell you what to do. But maybe you need a frying pan to the head, you know?”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I told you, I’m better in the kitchen.”

“You’re doing remarkably well, then.” Theo breathed out, ran a hand through his hair, then asked, almost timid, “How did you know you loved Josephine?”

Tom took a moment, frowned. “I think... I thought I didn’t know how to love. And then suddenly I did. And I didn’t want to live a single day without her.”

Theo remembered how he felt in those mad months, so perfectly imperfect, and the cold years since then. “I have lived so many days without Jack Gardner. I should be fine.”

“That’s the thing, though. Did you want to?” And then Tom lowered his voice, more gentle than Theo had ever heard him be. “Are you fine?”

Theo thought about every glass of whiskey and every time he played pretend and every choice he made to please other people. Every night he went to bed and hoped he would wake up with someone else.

“We ran away because we needed to. I found a home. I found Josie. You came back, but you weren’t free, you know? You didn’t let yourself be free.”

“I thought it was what I had to do.”

“Yeah. I don’t have an answer for that.” Tom drained the last drops of his ginger beer and picked up the menu again, studying it with a chef’s trained eye. “You don’t have to anymore, though.”

“No.” Theo looked out into the flawless sunshine and wished so badly to fly away and leave his heavy past behind. “Maybe...maybe not anymore.”

“Good.” Tom smiled, his rough face showing an ease, a new life without this last debt. “Now. Let’s order.”

By the time Theo got home, stuffed full of too-rich food and hand still tingling from Tom’s enthusiastic final handshake, he could almost imagine a life where he had chosen to be free. To be himself. To be happy.

Almost.

He chose this pain, and God, did it hurt.

Face down in the tattoo chair, Theo listened as the needle buzzed, a thousand tiny pinpoints of ink drilling into his back. Tom sat next to him, not holding his hand, exactly, but lending the quiet strength he’d always dedicated to his oldest friends.