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I probably shouldn’t be so harsh on my hometown, but my childhood outside my house and Elliot’s had been pretty shit, and the two of us—Elliot and I—couldn’t wait to move away, down south to the big city. To Madison, which, I learned soon enough, wasn’t actually that big a city. To be perfectly frank, Shawano wasn’t really recommending itself much this visit, either. When every reason you come back to a town is someone’s death, you don’t find yourself getting any more attached to it.

At this point, I couldn’t imagine moving back to Shawano in a million fucking years.

I’d visit Elliot if he moved back, though. I didn’t want to live here, but I didn’t hate itthatmuch. To be completely honest, I don’t actuallyhateShawano. It has its charms. It also has like two stoplights and a pile of bigots, like most small towns in America. And, realistically, most large towns. It’s just that the bigger ones also have a whole bunch ofotherpeople—and those other people kinda offset the bigotry.

Shawano also had some lovely trees and the Wolf River, lots of corn and cows and some forest. It was honestly rather pretty. And didn’t have a lot of traffic or pollution… Okay, so it was probably a pretty decent place to live as long as you liked the countryside.

I’m not a countryside kinda guy, but nobody was asking me to live here. Elliot? Elliot liked digging in the mud. Literally. I knew he went camping by himself sometimes so that he could go dig around in the dirt, so maybe he actually would like living here, although I worried a little about how he was going to rebuild the client base he’d so carefully cultivated over the last decade in a completely different city about three hours south.

But that really wasn’t my problem—or my business. I’d do what I could to be supportive, of course, but if Elliot wanted to move back home to Shawano, he didn’t need me to like it. I’d drive down to Madison with him and help him pack and move boxes if he wanted me to.

I took a breath, blew it out, and reminded myself that we had a giant pile of shit to get through before that was even remotely a problem. Like picking out what was going to go in the coffin with Gregory Crane to the afterlife.

Once Elliot was ready. For now, I’d stand with him at the window, staring out at the weathered carving of his mom through the misty fog of an early December day, for as long as he needed.

* * *

My stomach growling,since it was after seven at night, and I’d barely managed to get anything into Elliot for lunch, which meant I’d barely gotten anything intomefor lunch. I dug my mom’s casserole and blondies out of the fridge in Elliot’s dad’s kitchen. Elliot’s kitchen, now, I guess. That thought put a pit in my stomach.

Or maybe it was just the lack of food.

I put the casserole dish into the oven and the blondies on the top to be warmed as the casserole baked. While we’d had Culver’s that first night, people had started dropping off food as soon as they knew Elliot was back in his dad’s house, so there had been no shortage of meal options for him to choose from. And this was Wisconsin, so most of the dishes had contained enough food for a couple days. This was day two of mom’s casserole, and the blondies.

In the living room, Elliot turned on the TV, and the faint mumble of televised voices provided background as I went into the fridge for some sort of vegetable or bread or anything I could eat, because of course most of the food people had left—including my mother’s—had meat in it. There had been a couple more containers left this morning that I hadn’t investigated yet.

No time like the present.

One of them was some unidentifiable noodle-and-ground-beef concoction. Another container yielded a marshmallow-fluff-fruit monstrosity that may not have been meat, but also wasn’t food as far as I was concerned. Marshmallows are fine, but marshmallow fluff is not. The third—thank God—had a cold noodle salad with vegetables that looked like it wouldn’t send me to the ER. I put all the food back, grabbed two beers, set a timer for the casserole, and went out to join Elliot on the couch.

I was enjoying the feel of the cold bottle on my aching hands. I’d helped Elliot build the small wooden spirit house, and even though I didn’t really think of my hands as at all delicate or soft, doing a lot of sanding and cutting by hand—because when you built a spirit house, you didn’t use power tools, or at least Elliot didn’t—had left my fingers and palms achy and sore.

“What are we watching?” I held out a beer.

He shrugged, but took the beer from me. “Doesn’t matter.”

“What time’s the game?” I asked him.

He blinked up at me. “Is there one?”

“Yeah. It’s Thursday.” The only reason Gregory Crane had even had cable was for football games, whether college or NFL.

“Oh. Um. Eight, probably.”

“Would you rather watch something else?” Maybe Elliot didn’t want to watch football. Maybe that would remind him too much of Gregory.

“No. Let’s watch the game.” He started flicking through the channels, looking for the right one.

“Coming up after the game, a protest in Green Bay turns violent after a member of the City Council is outed as a shifter. Should politicians be allowed to run for office without disclosing their Arcane status? We’ll be back with this breaking story and your thoughts after the game.”

I stared at the TV. “Fuck.”

Elliot frowned. “What?”

I gestured at it. “The protest in Green Bay.”

“What about it?” He didn’t sound concerned.

“You aren’t bothered that there’s been a violent protest over a shifter on the fucking City Council?”