Coming into Black Creek that afternoon after so long was probably akin to the experience of people returning to a place of their youth, to find everything a little smaller and more begrimed than the way they were remembered by their smaller and more begrimed selves. As if my turning onto that very exit road animated a tableau of that night, the steely sky closed in and the snow threw down. I didn’t remember that the drive from the highway to the hospital parking lot was literally seconds: The storm-gauzed lights from the hospital building, glimpsed from the top of the ridge road, were as terrifying to me as if I’d come upon an alien installation. I drove down there and parked for a moment in the lot. After seeing Stefan in the locked ward that night, I’d come back out here, and, laying my hand against the hot hood of the still-running car, I threw up in the snow.

There were things I hadn’t thought about for years; how was that possible?

I remembered again the sticky red leather seat of the booth in the Denny’s, where, that following morning, Jep and I sat across from Stefan’s lawyer located quickly for us by a coach friend of Jep’s. He sketched in the potential outcomes of our son’s case. Some were bad; some were worse. “We don’t want a trial. The best hope is a judge who’ll see Stefan as a kind of victim too, of drugs, not a longtime user but a first-time offender; a judge who’ll give him less than ten years, for manslaughter, maybe a spin in a mental health facility, even though those places are hellholes.”

“And the worst hope?”

“Murder can mean a life sentence,” he said. “Parole after twelve years maybe.”

Worlds we never knew existed were smashing fists to our ribs. I didn’t want to remember that sensation. There was no profit in such recollections. It was getting late now so I slowly steered the car out of the hospital lot and headed toward the town.