Lance has reached the creekbank before he realizes it’s even in sight. It’s masked by ice and snow. He presses his palm against the rough bark of a tree that’s dry-brushed with dark green lichen. He knows the water is still moving invisibly and silently under the shell of ice. He knows it like he knows his own heart is beating without checking his pulse.

Close to the creek’s edge, he can see a jagged-edged oval of darker, thinner ice where an animal must have broken through to drink and that crusted over again but hasn’t frozen solid yet. He studies the bank for clues and sees one clear, cloven hoofprint, but it’s too large to be that of a deer. With a frown, he squints up and down the stretch of the creek, just in case someone’s loose cow is still close by. He remembers the cattle in the road yesterday when they were driving in. The memory is surreal, like that moment should have been longer ago. He feels like he slept a hundred years last night, and awoke as someone else. Not someone new, though. An old self…one he left here in the now-burned farmhouse on the night he ran off and never came back.

He walks along the icy edge of the creek, frozen mud crunching under his loaned boots. Johnny has big fucking feet, he’s learned, and he wishes he’d put on two pairs of socks to keep his feet from shifting so much inside the boots’ stiff, wool lining. He’s already courting blisters.

It’s not the first time he’s wondered what Johnny’s whirlwind tours of Las Vegas, New York City, and Los Angeles mean for Robbie, especially with Danny gone off to school. It’s been hard for Lance to picture Robbie alone.

Before yesterday, he’d hoped—or feared, it was hard to say which—that at least Robbie had still had Megan. And that maybe with the boys fully raised and out of the house, he’d really given Megan a chance, the way he so obviously hadn’t in all their prior years together.

Robbie claimed that he and Megan had really ended things. That’s hard for Lance to imagine. Megan was the villain in all of Lance’s fantasies, which was ridiculous because she was—and probably still is—one of the kindest people alive. And she’s beautiful, patient, and practical. If Lance had been asked to invent a woman who was worthy of Robbie, Megan would have come closer than anyone he could have made up.

But she isn’t here. And Lance has a vivid memory of the way that Robbie was looking at him in the kitchen that morning, and the coffee mug tumbling out of his hand.

Lance hadn’t imagined Robbie’s stare in those moments. And if it meant what he would have assumed it did, if the man had been anyone but Robbie…well, if Lance’s suspicions are correct, then, incredibly, he doesn’t know how to feel. His sixteen-year-old self would have flung himself at Robbie at the merest glimmer of interest, overjoyed.