Theo sat on a bench in the park next to the Washington Monument on Charles Street. He’d sat down because he’d been pacing for far too long, and he needed something else to do with himself before people started to give him funny looks.

He walked past the coffee shop first, of course, fifteen minutes early, and then realized that Jack was sitting there, back to the window, and even his back was familiar—those clean, broad lines—and he thought he might be sick.

Thirty-seven seemed too old to feel like a schoolboy with a crush. But he apparently had no control over—

A couple walked by, holding hands, a poodle leashed to one of their wrists. They were maybe in their sixties, a little chubby with it, and worn rings glinted on their fourth fingers. He wondered how long they had been together before they got married—if they had called themselves husbands even when they weren’t seen by the rest of the world. The shorter man laughed, and the taller stooped down to kiss him, and their dog made a canine huffing noise like happiness.

Theo felt like hitting something.

Fuck Jack Gardner.

He hadn’t thought that the world could change. He hadn’t thought that he could change. His youth was so truncated by his own choices, and he could hardly remember why—why he had felt such an urgent need to marry, to reproduce, to assimilate. In Ireland he had been so free, so defiant, and it wasn’t easy there, but it was so good. But the Theo who came home let go of those things. Buried them without giving himself the grace to mourn. He had blamed his mother, but looking back at that young man, looking at all the years since then, he felt exhausted by what was very likely his own cowardice. Maybe his greed—maybe the family money changed him. Maybe he was, after all, his father’s son.

And Jack—he had really thought that Jack had cared for him. That he could be loved for the person he truly was. Finding out that that inexplicable happiness was a lie was—

He really wanted a cigarette right now, even though he hadn’t smoked in almost seventeen years.

Kids from the art school around the corner huddled on another bench, flirting and cursing and being young, and he could hear the traffic all around him, smell city smells like smoke and urine and stone and plants, and the early-October air was still warm like the end of summer screaming out against the oncoming chill. Theo pulled his jacket tighter around him despite the warmth, the collar up against his neck, and he ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth in that habit he had since he was eighteen.