Asher and Luke sit just beyond the tables, on the cooling sand of the beach. Asher has slipped his feet out of his flip-flops and digs his heels into the sand but Luke’s long toes are firmly planted in his leather sandals. He used to wear the same kind back in Cumberland Valley long before any other men would have even dreamed of wearing shoes that revealed their feet. Behind them the homeless men are quiet, playing a card game or eating Vienna sausages from little blue cans. There is nothing but the breeze in the palms and the lonesome cry of a gull that paces along the water’s edge, looking out to sea.

Asher can’t stop staring at his brother. He betrayed him, left him alone in the world all these years, but here he is. Here, alive, beautiful, the older brother who always watched over him until the day Asher turned him away. And ten years older. Lines on his face, a furrow across his brow. His hair is thinner and lighter, but his Luke-blue eyes are just the same.

He wants to touch his brother’s face, even to reach out and hold his hand. Asher has wasted years and years. He has thrown away an entire decade he could have been with Luke, who always loved him for who he was. But Asher had not been able to do the same for him.

For years Asher has been practicing how he would apologize to Luke if he ever found him again, but so far his lips have not lit on the right words. Everything sounds like a cliché, or hollow.

“I wish I could take it back,” he says.

The horizon has changed to the red of a geranium. Luke is watching the crimsoned waves and for a moment Asher thinks he is not going to respond. But then, he does. “Well, you can’t,” he says, and Asher feels like the breath has been knocked out of him by the anger that edges Luke’s words. “You can’t take back what you called me. And you can’t take back just letting me go.”

“I didn’t know how to find you. I didn’t even know where to start—”

Luke latches his eyes on Asher’s and his gaze is hard. “Come on, now, Asher. Quit lying to yourself. You know good and well that you didn’t even try.”

“Not at first.”

“Not for months,” Luke says. “When I first left, I only went to Nashville. You didn’t call my friends. You didn’t search. And so after almost a year of living not even an hour from you and seeing that you weren’t worried about me, I left Tennessee. I’d always wanted to, and you were the only thing holding me to home anyway.”