I didn’t wait for his answer. I gathered Mia, made some noise about her being tired, and drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel.
I didn’t sleep. After I tucked Mia in, I pulled out the plastic bin of photos I’d been avoiding for a year.
There they were on the Flagstaff trip.
Mike grinning into the camera outside the tattoo parlor, a fresh square of gauze taped behind his ear, sunburned, a teenager, and immortal.
The next shot in the stack was of the two of them at some diner an hour or a day later, Harold mid-laugh, head half turned toward Mike as if to answer something. His ear was plain in the light. Nothing behind it. Just the freckled skin of a boy who’d changed his mind at the last minute.
I set the two pictures side by side on the kitchen table.
Mike had teased Harold for years about chickening out.
“Six months ago,” I said out loud to the empty kitchen. “He grew his hair out six months ago.”
I already knew what I was going to do in the morning.
Harold answered the door in a T-shirt and sweatpants, looking like he hadn’t slept either. Mia was home with Rachel.
