“We’d better,” Robbie says, “before the other kids raid the birthday cake and there’s nothing left for you.”

“That would be a nightmare,” Lance agrees with exaggerated distress. “What kind did you get?”

“Yellow, with chocolate frosting.”

Lance bounces in the seat, grinning. And just like that, he looks sincerely excited. His ability to cast aside the dark and seize the light leaves Robbie briefly awestruck, and then Robbie gives the slender shoulder under his hand a final squeeze, and smiles back, taking his foot off the brake.

It isn’t as easy for Robbie as it was for Lance to shake off the shadows of the last hour. In fact, they never really leave him at all.

Today.

The seat of Trace County is Dell, population 2,833. Dell is as familiar to Robbie as the back of his hand. He could navigate its neat, rectangular blocks blindfolded.

Every house he passes calls to mind the names and faces of the people who have lived there from the time of his earliest childhood memories on until now, thirty-odd years later. He remembers taking Johnny to bible school at the Methodist church, which is a single-story brick box that squats at the first turn into a city street off the highway, over by the gas station. The only thing that clearly denotes its status as a place of worship is the plain metal cross bolted to its west-facing wall. He’d thought sending him was the right thing to do; their parents had sent Robbie. But Johnny had returned with so many unanswerable questions after the first day, Robbie had never taken him back.

The little white bungalow a block down used to be hunter green, and it’s where he attended his first sleepover when he was nine. Or, he attempted to. He had to ask his host’s mom to call Robbie’s mom around nine o’clock, after he panicked and shut himself in the bathroom for twenty minutes. He still remembers the bathroom very clearly—it had that old hex floor tile, but instead of in classic black and white, it was blue. There were several broken tiles next to the old iron tub. A single spider web clung to the upper cabinet above the sink.

At the edge of downtown is a big, ornately painted Victorian that belongs to Sadie Bannister, whose daughter, Chloe, Robbie once flirted with at a tailgate party to see if it was possible to make Megan jealous. His experiment had ended with Megan slugging him in the arm and kissing him silly, tasting like chocolate and rum. He’d been unable to look Chloe in the eye after that. She’d left for college and hadn’t been back since. She was a university professor somewhere, now.

It isn’t nostalgia that Robbie feels when he takes a good look around at Dell; it’s stranger than that. More like all the years of his life overlap and time loses its meaning. Robbie’d rather just stay at the ranch.

The farm store, Cal’s, takes up the space where there was once a Sears. Robbie can remember buying school clothes there, and a shiny propane grill that his dad used exactly once before giving it up as a lost cause. The farm store opened about a decade ago. It’s named after the original owner, but his son and namesake runs it now. They charge twice as much as one of the chains would if anyone cared to drive another fifty miles. And luckily for Cal’s, most people who live in and around Dell don’t leave the area unless forced.