Several days later, Angela Reed found Rickards on a bench in Denver’s Bear Creek Park, quietly overlooking a small playground filled with children scampering about, squealing with laughter and chasing one another in a game of tag.

Angela slowed several feet from the bench when Joe turned and glanced up at her.

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

“Sorry,” he replied.  “Been a little busy.”

She stepped forward and eased herself down onto the other half of the bench.  “Everything okay?”

“As well as it can be.”

“When you disappear, you really disappear.”

“Sorry,” he said again, briefly glancing back at the playground.  It used to be his daughter’s favorite.

Angela lowered her large purse beside her and watched the children with a smile.  “How did it go with your mother-in-law?”

“Interesting.”

“Just interesting?”

He thought a moment and turned back.  “She was more than a little reluctant.  But I convinced her.”

“How?”

“I told her I’d just keep coming back to visit her until she agreed.”

“I’ll bet that did the trick,” Angela said with a laugh.  “And?”

“I took her,” he said simply, “to Bolivia.”

“And did she go in?”

“Eventually, but it took a while.  She thought I was insane.”

“And?”

“Well, she doesn’t think I’m insane anymore.”

“What happened?”

He gave a soft shrug.  “She went in—and came out thirty minutes later crying.”

Angela inhaled.  “What did she see?”

“I don’t know.  She wouldn’t say.”

“At all?”

Rickards shook his head.

“So… you have no idea what—?”

“No.  But something happened.  After that, she didn’t hate me anymore.”

“Well, that’s good.”

He nodded solemnly.  “Yeah.”

They both fell quiet, listening only to the sound of the children playing.

“Are you back to work?”

Rickards shook his head again.  “I quit.”

“You quit?”

He raised his head and looked at her.  “Kind of hard to go back.  Things are too different now.”

“I can understand that.”

“How about you?”

Angela nodded beneath a head of light-brown hair.  “I’m back teaching at the university.  But it is different.”  She looked out over a group of pine trees, their needles twinkling in the light spring breeze.  “Surreal, really.  It’s as if very little in the world matters anymore.”

“Yep.”

“I turn on the TV and listen to the news, and it all feels so, I don’t know, juvenile.  Everyone just arguing over things that don’t matter—at all.  But they don’t know it.”

Rickards gazed absently at the ground.  “That’s about it.”

She grinned and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.  “Half the time my students ask me a question, and I just want to answer, ‘Who cares?’”

Rickards smiled.

“I feel strange,” she went on.  “As if I’m in this place between the life I’ve lived and the life I’m supposed to live now.”

“I get that.”