Teddy sits on my foot.

“I divide my time pretty evenly between here and L.A.,” Gabe says. “I do miss seasons.”

“It does seem like Montana delivers on that end.”

“It does. Makes up for other things.” He gestures. “A lack of synagogues and the like.”

“I’m sure your family is happy to have you around,” I say.

“Yeah,” Gabe says. “Especially after the accident.”

I turn to him. “I’m sorry about your brother-in-law.”

Gabe is looking at the tree. “Yeah,” he says. “That was a bad year.”

I reach out and take his hand. When he links his fingers with mine, I realize that we’ve never really held hands before. Not like this.

It’s surprisingly intimate, his palm pressed against mine, the calluses of his fingers, the warmth of his skin.

“It’s not a perfect place,” Gabe says. “Cooper.”

I stare up at the tree.

“Neither is L.A.,” I say.

I think about how it felt when I came back from New York. How I expected L.A. to feel like home again, but it didn’t. How a part of me has been chasing that feeling without really knowing what I’m looking for.

“Believe it or not,” Gabe says. “The tree isn’t the thing I wanted you to see.”

He gives me a tug and I realize we’re still holding hands. That brief shock of intimacy smoothed out into something comfortable. Something familiar.

We go around the massive tree trunk, and I can smell the pine.

The town is decorated in nostalgia.

Gabe stops us in front of the one building that isn’t lit up with Christmas lights and holly. It’s dark, with boarded-up windows and a cracked marquee. If this was a Hollywood film, it would serve as a metaphor for the tortured hero’s tortured past.

Standing back a little, I see that it’s an old theatre.

“Ta-da!” Gabe says.

There’s a FOR SALE sign on the window of the ticket booth, and a SOLD sticker tacked over it.

“Mazel tov,” I tell Gabe.

“Do you want to go inside?” he asks.

“Is it haunted?”

He grins. “Only one way to find out,” he says.

Inside, the air is filled with cobwebs and dust. It’s not a movie theater, like I expected, but a theatre-theatre. There’s a stage and a small pit for a small orchestra. There are at least three hundred seats and even two modestly sized but grandly built balconies on either side of the stage.

“I hope you didn’t pay a lot for it,” I say.

Gabe tsks and Teddy sneezes.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he says. “Use your imagination.”

“I’m imagining a lot of mice and rats using this space to stage their own rodent-positive version of The Nutcracker,” I say.