Teddy’s face dropped and the conversation dried up. And it turned out that the best time to catch some peace with him was while he was eating. He barely came up for breath after that and a good ten minutes passed in silence. Every now and then, the sheriff glanced across the table at Peter and smiled as if to make sure he was having a nice time. Peter smiled back and continued to push food around his plate. But he wasn’t hungry. And after a while, the silence became the void in which to see Cooper and Becky sitting there, side by side around the campfire surrounded by all their new friends. Surrounded by the ones nobody should be making friends with.

Peter stared into the candle’s softly flickering flame. It curled then tapered back into a point and the trailer, along with all his thoughts, dissolved into the darkness behind its golden halo.

It would have been easier if Cooper had died. If Cooper had died back there at the falls and never returned, Peter’s life would have been over, but at least he would never have gone on to suffer this. The rest of his life would have been empty, but it would have been full of imagined memories. Like love letters left unwritten, those memories would never come to be, but he’d have imagined their lives being perfect. They would’ve been filled with that time yet to come when he and Cooper took Snowball out across the plains just to watch stardust and glitter hurtle silently over the mountains as a meteor shower passed by. Or that time yet to come when Cooper, much older now, rose from their bed in the middle of the day to stand at the open door where blue jays played. Blond hairs between his legs would be all downy in the sunlight; both his beard and hair now tied back with an old bootlace, as golden as their matching wedding bands. Cooper would run down to the water’s edge naked, calling Peter’s name as he went. Peter would go to answer but knowing full well that Cooper was only ever saying his name just so he could hear it. And all those imagined memories would have filled so many unwritten love letters that it’d be all he could do just to stuff them inside every pillowcase and cupboard for safekeeping. And inside the emptiness of his life without Cooper, those memories would have been everything, everything and anything but this, the pain of being around long enough to see the moment someone doesn’t love you any more.