He lingered there. I knew he wanted to say more, but I had no idea what it might be. Whatever it was, it was weighing heavily on him. “Do you ever wanna just play the game and forget about all the crap in the world?” he asked.

“All the time,” I told him.

He nodded, then said what he’d been holding back. “There are five of them, you know.”

Maybe I’m just dense, but I didn’t realize what he was talking about. “Five what?”

“Skaters. Didn’t I go out with you looking for twins? And instead there’s five. All identical. I saw them at your game.”

I chuckled nervously. “What are the odds?”

He lingered there, not coming in, not leaving. The threshold is a funny place. The ultimate spot of noncommittal. And yet they say it’s one of the best places to be in an earthquake. Go figure.

“Ash, what’s going on?” Hunter asked. “Because I know something is. Something freaky. I want to know if I should be scared.”

There were as many ways to answer that as there were universes. So I chose to slide around the question. “You and I talk about stuff, right?” I asked. Because I had memories of it, but also memories of not talking to Hunter about much at all.

“We never talked about you being gay.”

“I know, but I mean other stuff.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I come to you when there are things I don’t want to talk to Mom and Dad about, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“But you never come to me.”

“I know. It’s an older brother thing,” I told him. “But maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll need to. Just . . . not right now.”

“So I shouldn’t be scared?” he said, bringing us back to the question I had hoped he had forgotten.

“I’ll be scared for both of us,” I told him.

He thought about that. Nodded, took a step back, and was out of the threshold. “Kickoff’s at noon,” he said. Then he left. I almost went after him to tell him the whole thing, but didn’t. He did not need the burden of what I knew. I could spare him that.

The morning continued in a dull shade of mundane. I should have appreciated that, but I was still braced, my fight-or-flight response poised on a hair trigger. Dad was already gone by the time I came downstairs—he had a golf game with the movers and shakers of Tibbetsville, as if anyone in our town can move or shake anything. He was a big fish in a very small pond, trying to become an even bigger fish.