“Forecast said no more than a day,” Lance says.

Robbie glances at him with a raised brow. “You’ve been watching the weather?” His tone is light, but the implication isn’t. There likely wasn’t a television in the one-cell jail on the third floor of the courthouse.

Lance shakes his head. “No,” he says, drawing out the word in a “duh” tone that makes Robbie smile. “Tim had an app on his phone. We have nothing in common, and talked all night, anyway, so the weather came up more than once.”

Robbie’s smile vanishes and his eyes narrow. “Why was he with you all night?” He gives Lance a sharp look. “He didn’t—was he bothering you?”

Lance’s hand slips over his mouth before Robbie can see his expression. His fingers are long, his palms narrow, and the backs of his hands are smooth-knuckled and hairless. Robbie can’t remember ever noticing someone’s hands like this before. But the long-lost boy-next-door has never reappeared in his life on the wrong side of a jailhouse door. Maybe strange and random reactions are par for this unfamiliar course.

“No,” Lance says eventually, turning to stare out the window. “I was about to freak out—no, I was freaking out—over spending the night in the cell, and he could tell. Must have been the fact that I was pacing around and almost hyperventilating. So, he stayed with me; made small talk. He’s a pretty good guy, actually.”

“I’m so sorry that you had to be there all night.” Robbie said it before, but it bears repeating.

Lance makes a little, dismissive gesture, and then his hand falls heavily into his lap like his arms are too tired to stay raised. Maybe they are, after the night he’s had.

“So,” Lance says more brightly, “what makes you disagree with the weatherman?”

Of all the things they should be talking about, Robbie thinks with mystification, they’re really going to discuss the weather. Though, it’s more of an immediate concern than usual, he supposes. The truck dives through a low place on the road where the snow is particularly thick and sends up a billowing cloud that reaches the windows.

“It’s an old farmer’s almanac thing,” Robbie says, shrugging and feeling oddly shy. “My dad used to say it. ‘Three months after a heavy fog, you’ll get rain or snow.’ And we had three days of fog, three months back.”

Lance glances at him. “Your dad,” he murmurs. “I guess you remember him, huh? Danny and Johnny never talked about him, but they were pretty little, when…?”

The flash of pain at the thought of that time is duller than it used to be, but still there, never gone completely. “Yeah,” Robbie says, “Johnny was eight, and Danny was four.”

A tractor had pulled onto the highway off of a gravel road, not seeing Robbie’s dad coming, and it had been too late for the truck to get stopped. Robbie’s dad had wound up in the ditch. At least it had been quick. The tractor hadn’t even needed major repairs.