But then Ruth wrapped her skinny arms around her knees, and Silas saw something he hadn’t noticed before. Fine lines along the inside of each, tight and unnatural, like too-often-repaired seams.

“What happened?” he asked, interrupting himself.

Ruth leaned back on her wrists, hiding her arms in the dark. He was about to ask her again when she spoke, almost inaudibly under the buzzing breath of the night.

“You’re a good dad, Mr. Harrison,” she said. “I wish you were mine.”

When he was her age, Silas imagined himself a kind of want-connoisseur, an aficionado of the ask more than the answer. But when he looked at Ruth then, the want he saw in her had nothing to do with heat or breath. It wasn’t a quickening in the gut, like the soul saw what it needed and grew hands just to reach. Her want was a long, deep hole. Where other wants swept fast and wide through the body, specific as to the outcome but flexible as to the conduit—I want that taste, that feeling; can you give it to me?—hers was focused, tailored. She was indifferent to feeling, seeking only the conduit. It was so plain in her eyes, he could tell she had never let herself want anything else. Just this one thing, a prisoner’s tunnel dug with a spoon.

Silas was almost it, this thing she wanted. But close didn’t count. He wasn’t her father; he never would be.

The present came rushing back in around him then, the black hole of the clearing and the lake and the tremor in his legs from Phil’s bike transforming from that night seventeen years ago back to this one, and he found himself overwhelmingly grateful. Somehow, finally, Silas wasn’t that age anymore. He had made it through all those wants, and all his bargaining with Philip, even though Philip never once complied. He thought for sure, back then, that a life without an answer from his brother would kill him. But it didn’t. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He didn’t need to spend so much time with his wants. He could spend time with what he already had.

He wasn’t a kid anymore, but this girl was. That was all that mattered.

“Ruth, I don’t know much about what you’ve been through, and I don’t have to. But you will always have a home here. Okay?”

When she started to cry, he put his arm around her.

“Hey,” he said, the way he did when Mickey would awake from nightmares. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

Ruth pushed the heels of her palms into her eyeballs, tears hot on her cold skin.

“Mr. Harrison,” she said, shaking, “I need to tell you—”

But then there was a crunch from the woods behind them.

“What are you doing?”

It was Sean.