“Troy told my father he wasn’t sleeping before he disappeared.”

“Neither was Dylan.”

Clark thought about her mother, thought about Troy, but finally she only cleared their cups from the table. “We owe Luke plenty.”

“Clark, you’re not listening to me.”

“I hear you fine. And I appreciate what you’re trying to do, really.” She struggled to smile. “But, Joel, listen—it’s easier to know that Troy’s dead than to eat dinner with his file at the table. When’s your flight?”

“Soon. Sadly. Will you be alright?”

A stone caught in Clark’s throat. Would she?

“You’ll always have a friend here, Joel. Truly.”

He smiled. “Maybe not here, here. I saw the sign in your yard. Where will you go when the house sells?”

“Somewhere I’m not Troy Clark’s sister.”

When they reached the door, Joel touched her arm. He lowered his voice for one final question. “The night Dylan started all of this he said he’d texted me by mistake. Do you think that’s true?”

“How would I know?” The words had come out sounding colder than Clark had intended. Like always. She readied herself to apologize but Joel only wrapped her in a one-armed embrace.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

Her phone rang as she let him out the door. Detroit, MI, the screen read. Clark didn’t know anyone in Detroit, MI. Another reporter, she supposed. She had nothing to say to them—she’d turned in her resignation days ago.

But when Detroit, MI rang again (and again and again), when she finally relented and answered, was it any wonder that her first response, upon hearing the voice at the other end of the line, was to feel just as much resentment as relief?

“Star,” a man said—ten years older, ten years the same. The only man who had ever been allowed to call her that.

She sank to the floor. She pressed a hand to her mouth.

“Star, it’s me.”

JOEL

His brother sent him one final message. It came when Joel was in flight, somewhere over the Mason-Dixon line. It came when he was somewhere between the past and the rest of his life, again. It came in a dream.

Yet when Joel awoke a few minutes later he could already feel its memory—like all the other memories of all the other dreams—slipping away from him. By the time his plane broke through the clouds and empty Manhattan thrust itself up before his window like some glimpse of a dubious future, Joel found that the dream had all but faded.

By the time he touched down all he could remember was this:

The sound of insects whirring in late afternoon. The expectant hush of an empty highway. The aubergine sky and the swell of hot light, an afternoon in autumn finally slipping into dusk.

They were at the football field, Dylan and Joel, alone. Dylan tottered along beside his brother, the top of his wobbly helmet barely coming to Joel’s waist, the fingers of one small gloved hand clutched tight in Joel’s palm. Dylan was speaking. Joel, for the first time in his life, was listening.