Richards was standing in the conical glare of the headlights, his hands on his hips. Whatever he had been holding was gone from sight.

“Thanks,” Grey said over the sound of the idling engine. He finished the last of his cigarette and tossed it on the pavement. “I really had to go.”

“Fuck you,” Richards said. “You have no idea.” Jack and Sam were looking at the ground. Richards tipped his head at the open door of the van. “All of you, in. And not one more fucking word.”

They took their seats in chastened silence; Richards started the engine and pulled back onto the roadway. That was when Grey realized it. He didn’t have to look at them to know. The other two, Jack and Sam: they were just like him. And something else. The thing Richards had been holding, which Grey guessed was now tucked away inside the waistband of his tracksuit or stashed in the glove compartment; that little dancing light in the grass, like a single dot of blood.

One more step, Grey knew, and Richards would have shot him.

Once a month, Grey took a shot of Depo-Povera, and every morning a little dot of a pill, star-shaped, of spironolactone. Grey had been following this regimen for a little over six years; it was a condition of his release.

And the truth was, he didn’t mind. He didn’t have to shave as much, there was that. The spironolactone, an antiandrogen, decreased the size of the testicles; since he’d begun taking it, he could shave every second or third day, and his hair was finer and less coarse, like when he was a boy. His skin was clearer and softer, even with the smoking. And of course there were the “psychological benefits,” as the prison shrink had called them. Things didn’t get to him the way they had, the way a feeling could twist inside him for days at a time, like a piece of glass he’d swallowed. He slept like a rock and never remembered his dreams. Whatever it was that made him pull over the truck that day, fifteen years ago—the day that started the whole thing—was long gone. Whenever he sent his mind back there, to that period of his life and all that came after, he still felt bad about it. But even this feeling was indistinct, a picture out of focus. It was like feeling bad about a rainy day, something no one could have helped.