As the strangers scattered, Collin had scattered, too. In the chaos, he dropped the gun where he’d found it and shrank into the crowd. When he was sure that it was over, when the masked group had fallen apart and disbanded, he made his way back down the hill; as he encountered people, he summoned his whitest voice. “Nothing going on up there,” he said with a shrug. “Someone set off fireworks or something.” And he slouched away, back to his car. He prayed to be forgotten, if he could be. He pulled the car out—the process was surprisingly complicated, and he couldn’t turn around—so he followed Meridian Circle forward until, eventually, it looped and spit him back out onto Prior Hills.

And somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself driving home, through the quiet back roads of Adena. Twenty minutes later, after 2:00 a.m., he turned onto his street, clicked the lights off, and pulled into the driveway.

He cranked down the window and sat there, in the dark within the dark, as the night gathered and, piece by piece, caught up with him. He had stopped something, he thought, even if he didn’t know exactly what. Or he had changed it for one person, at least. It was like the planets—they each had neared the other enough to change both of their orbits, if only briefly. If only once.

He got out of the car and let himself in through the front door. He dropped his keys in the bowl on the table and went to the kitchen, still in his shoes. He turned on the lights, opened the cabinets, and took out a box of cereal, one of the bowls from the stack. He poured the cereal from a height, so it rattled in the bowl. He opened and closed the fridge for the milk, and then noisily put the ingredients back away. He set the bowl down, got a spoon from the drawer, and dragged a chair out from the table: only when he saw his mother standing in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown, still blond but looking older than usual, shorter, too, only then did he sit down, silently.