He crossed in front of the altar and knelt, and then he went to the pulpit, where he stood on a platform to give himself more height and began making notes as he flipped through tissue-thin pages in his Bible. No doubt he had a sermon to give that night. He had his head down in concentration, and he didn’t see me. I tried to call to him, but my throat choked up, unable to form words. He’d barely changed from the man in my memory. Maybe he’d put on a couple of pounds and lost a little more hair, but that was all. His thick glasses were in the same black frames. His beard made a trimmed square around his lips and mouth. He hummed as he worked, the way he often did, a tuneless grumble that was easy to hear in the acoustics of the church.

As he considered his sermon, he tapped a pencil against his mouth and then looked up pensively. That was when he finally saw me sitting in the pew. His face broke into a warm smile, and I tried to hold it together, to not cry. To him, this was an ordinary moment, his boyhood friend paying him an unexpected visit. To me, it was a gift that only came for a few moments in the occasional dream. My companion, my anchor, my confidant, was here with me again.

“Dylan, what a nice surprise,” Roscoe said, in a voice that was much deeper than anyone would expect from his size.

He came down from the pulpit. For a small man, he always walked quickly. I stood up, and he pulled me into a hug. His hugs were long, he said, because life was short. Then he took the back of my head in his hands and kissed both of my cheeks. It was a habit he’d picked up on a summer trip to Italy, and he never let go of it. That greeting from him was something I’d never thought I would experience again.

The two of us sat down next to each other in the pew. I stared at him like he was an old photograph come to life, and he stared at me with an equal intensity. His keen eyes narrowed with surprise as he took a close look at my face. Somehow, I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to hide the truth from him. This man knew me better than anyone other than Karly, and like a parent with identical twins, he could tell immediately that the man in front of him was different from the man he knew.

I was not the Dylan Moran that this Roscoe Tate had grown up with. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew that something was wrong.

“This is very odd,” he said.

“What is?”

“Well, you’ve changed. I can’t put my finger on how.”

“It’s just me, Roscoe.”