The years that separated him from the moment he found Luke curled around his wife’s headstone, an empty six-pack next to him, disappeared. He’d held his friend while sobs racked the man’s body as the grief he’d bottled burst through his cracks. They never spoke of that moment. They didn’t have to. They were brothers without the blood. They’d traded life saves back and forth like kids traded baseball cards or Pokémon shit.

“Hey there, handsome!” Valerie Washington was seventy-three years old, looked like she was fifty, and acted like she was eighteen. She waved a margarita glass from her front porch where she was perched with a stack of romance novels and biographies, her fresh haul from the library.

“When are you going to divorce Mr. Washington and marry me?” Aldo demanded, jogging in place and flexing for her.

She slid her oversized prescription sunglasses down her nose and gave him a wink.

“When he stops being excellent in bed,” she shot back.

Aldo blew her a kiss and pressed on, finally winding his way onto the lake trail. Benevolence was slowly waking up to spring. Green buds sprouted in the canopy above him while his feet raced over last year’s leaves. Beginnings and endings.

And just like that, his thoughts turned to Gloria Parker. It had been a week since everything changed. A week of torture. Wanting something so badly. Knowing that he couldn’t have it, try for it. Not yet. He’d left town last weekend under the guise of a fishing trip so he wouldn’t show up on her mother’s front porch begging to see Her. Instead, he’d paced a cabin in West Virginia for forty-eight hours straight and ran himself into the ground on the mountain trails until he was too exhausted to even think about inserting himself into her life.

No. She needed time. Time to herself, to heal. He’d be patient. Just as he’d been since high school. Besides, Glenn could slide right through again. Could end up winning her back again. If that happened, Aldo knew he wouldn’t be able to stay out of it.

He felt the afternoon sun on his face, the sweat as it rolled down his back and, for the first time in a long time, felt hopeful about being patient.

“You keep runnin’ like that, you’ll puke.” Deputy Ty Adler, the man who had the distinct pleasure of placing Glenn Diller under arrest, joined him at the Y in the trail. He was wearing a Benevolence PD ball cap and a Not-So-Polar Plunge t-shirt.

“How’s it going, deputy?”

“Just fine. Just fine,” Ty drawled.

Ty had moved to Benevolence in high school, laid eyes on teenage Sophie Garrison, and fallen flat on his face in love. It had taken him a couple of years to drag a commitment out of her, but they were happy, their little family of three.