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Yeah, sure, there was the occasional mention of a date or, more often, a hook-up. Elliot has a lot fewer hangups about casual sex than I ever did—again, I don’t judge. It’s not a thing I can do, but that’s about me and my issues. Hell, right up until Taavi, I’dwishedI could do it.

And now here I was, getting driven back to the small, shitty town we grew up in, the town neither of us thought we’d ever move back to because Elliot’s dad, a man who had loved me almost as much as his own kid, had been killed, and I was bringing my very-much-alive parents and my boyfriend.

Just rubbing both my living parents and the love of my life in his grieving face.

Fuck.

And now I felt absolutely horrible, because I had brought Taavi with me becauseIwanted him here, and now I was going to essentially abandon him to my parents so that I didn’t make things even worse for Elliot. Because the alternative was to force Elliot to be polite to Taavi in absolutely godawful circumstances, which would be awkward and terrible for all three of us.

So now I felt especially bad for Taavi, who really didn’t need to be here and who had already endured a crowded flight and two-plus hours in a car with my mother because I was a selfish dick.

Double fuck.

3

My parents livein a lovely house that was built about a decade before I was born, all tan carpets and tile floors and split levels. It was great as a kid—the blue slate foyer was the ocean, the tan carpet of the hallway the sand, and so on. The stairs were mountains for my toy soldiers to climb or my cars to race down on make-shift toilet-paper tube racetracks. I’d once created an epic tripping hazard by using my wooden train tracks to create a circuit through half the house.

As an adult, I sometimes wondered how no one had ever taken a header down any of the stairs—to the ground floor open rec room and my dad’s den, or up the half-level to the kitchen and living room, or another half level to the bedrooms—and broken a leg or an arm. Especially when Elliot and I had a few hours and the right supplies to create runs for our Hot Wheels or oversized marbles.

But my parents fucking love their house. It wasn’t going to be at all practical when they got too old to handle stairs, but so far, so good. I, on the other hand, tripped on the top step on the way up to my old room—although at least I didn’t faceplant on the carpet.

My room had been converted into a guest room with an actual queen-size bed, although there were enough tchotchkes from my childhood that it was still clear that it had beenmyroom. But thank God Mom wasn’t one of those parents who didn’t change anything about their kid’s room. My aesthetic has moved on quite a bit from when I was a kid and had movie posters fromDie HardandDirty Harryon my walls.

I dropped my backpack on the floor beside the bed with its tasteful light blue and green geometric pattern and coordinating pillows, then sat down to text Elliot that we were back in Shawano and ask him what he wanted me to do.

Taavi set his duffel on the little cedar storage bench near the door, looking around at the things my mother had left in the room on little shelves mounted on the wall.

A little clay pinch-pot I’d made at some point in grade school. A trophy from something I’d done in high school—debate team, maybe? A little wooden carved animal of indeterminate species from 4H. Graduation pictures from both high school and college.

Taavi picked up one of them—of Elliot and I at our college commencement—and stared at it, then looked at me, then back at the photograph.

“I told you I used to look completely different.” It was always a little weird to see those pictures. I didn’t have the heart to tell my mom to take them down, because they didn’treallybother me, but it was weird. It always made me more self-conscious when I looked at my new self in the mirror.

Taavi glanced back and forth again. “I can see it,” he replied.

“See what?”

He walked over and sat next to me, his finger pointing at the side of my face in the picture. “This line here.” Then his finger traced from my hairline to my jaw beside my ear. “It’s still the same.”

I snorted.

“Your nose,” he said, running his finger along the bridge of my nose. “And here.” His finger tapped beside my eye where the crow’s feet were more prominent than they had been last year.

I glanced down at the photograph. Me and Elliot, both in our black graduation robes with our silly mortarboard hats and their red-and-white tassels tossed to the just-graduated side. Both of us grinning like idiots, Elliot a couple inches taller than me, his arm around my stocky shoulders.

I didn’t see whatever resemblance Taavi saw. I had a squarish face, uninspired brown hair, and generic pinkish white-dude skin. My eyes weren’t remarkable in color—just plain old brown—but they at least had some life to them.

Okay, I guess I did see his point about the eyes. Sure, now they were an arresting lavender, but my eyes had been big for my face even then, rounder than you’d expect, which made me look a little bit startled and cartoony as a human, but added to my ethereality as an elf.

And I saw the laugh-lines, even in my twenty-two-year-old face. The beginnings of the crinkles that I could feel when I laughed almost two decades later.

It was funny, that. I didn’t think of myself as someone who smiled or laughed a lot, but you could see it in my face in the picture. Elliot, too. Both of us happy and hopeful. We’d kept it a little longer, but that hope had started dying only a few years after the academy, at least for me. By the time I left Milwaukee, it was well and truly dead.

Maybe my laugh-lines were all from those early years. Because I hadn’t had a whole lot to laugh or smile about between then and now.

My phone buzzed beside me on the bed, and I handed the photo back to Taavi to pick it up.

Meet me at the house?Elliot had asked.