The orange and yellow leaves up on Wild Horse Hill spun in cones when the wind whipped. Without close family, the holidays always approached with a certain stealth. There were no gifts to buy for kids, just sloshy parties in high rises. Glittering women and serious men returning to their true personalities under the influence of spiced drinks.

Lance had always been home for me, waiting for me to drop a tray of foil-covered leftovers in his corner of the kitchen. He’d been responsible for some of my best Thanksgiving memories.

In the front seat of the rental car, I scratched my head. A notepad leaned on the steering wheel, and I’d written only one incomplete line.

---

Lance, you weren’t just a good boy, you were—

---

Wild Horse Hill was a disorganized mess of oddly-shaped tombstones from a hundred years ago to the present. The land had never been purchased for a cemetery, but no one in their right mind would buy it and dig up a bunch of bodies. The unofficial pet cemetery was behind a copse of trees. There wasn’t as much of a view, but all the good girls and boys were at their master’s feet.

---

—you were family.

---

Such a cliché. Everyone said that, but no one had a Lance. A car pulled up next to mine. Assuming it was the delivery guy with Lance’s body, I got frustrated by the end of my time alone. I wouldn’t finish the eulogy.

My irritation flipped to relief when the car’s engine cut and I looked across the windows to the driver.

Catherine.

Jesus. Catherine. The girl in the roses. Not sixteen anymore, but filled out with experience and maturity. Knowledge made her even more beautiful.

Hold it together, Chris.

She got out, clutching her shoulder bag to her side, and stood at the front of her car with an envelope in her hand.

I got out. “Hi. I’m glad you—”

“I’m sorry.”

“For?”

She handed me the envelope. It was desiccated and crumbling. The pale blue envelope I’d used to send resumes in had yellowed and browned at the edges. The envelope flap hung on by the last bits of glue. I looked at the front. Her address. My handwriting. We were at least joined in that.

“This was the last one I sent,” I said, handing it back. I knew what was inside it.

“I didn’t know,” she said, clutching her bag’s straps to replace her grip on the envelope. “My mother. Or my dad too. I don’t know. She knew she was leaving as soon as she could, and she wanted me to be taken care of. She didn’t want… me to make a bad choice. She hid them. All of them.”

I looked at it again and flipped it open.

The night I met Lucia and she looked over my shoulder at my checking account, I’d been so broken about this letter.

“Did you read it?” I asked.

“No, I just pulled out one. There were boxes of them. All of them. I’m so sorry.”

I handed her back the envelope. “Open it.”

She took it and opened the folded paper. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d written.

“Oh, Chris.” She took out the check. “Seven hundred forty-nine.”

I leaned over her to see my words.

We’re even.

Just those two words in the center of a page. No more words of love. No more promises of one rose to the dollar or anything else. Simply an accounting.

“It was never about money,” she said. “Not for me.”

“I couldn’t figure out what else. I couldn’t believe you’d miss every single one.”

“They must have hoarded them.”

Catherine Barrington always saw the good in people. Thirteen years later, she was still defending her mother’s paranoid psychosis. All I’d do by arguing was disabuse her of the illusions that kept her sane. I leaned on my car and she leaned on hers, the letter and the check fluttering in the wind as if they wanted to finally be free.

“If you’d read them, what would you have done?”

She looked into the wind, letting her hair blow away from her face. Her ear was perfectly shaped in a delicate swirl. The hole in her lobe was an empty comma.

“I want to say I would have run to you,” she said, still looking over the cemetery. “I want to say nothing could have stopped me.” When she turned back to me, her hair flew across her face like lines on a ledger. “But I don’t know if I can say it. I never wanted to leave. Sometimes I thought I used you as an excuse to stay here. Then you were gone and I missed you, but would I have gone to you if I saw the letters? I don’t know.”

She pushed a pebble with her toe and I knew it was because she couldn’t look at me. She was ashamed, and despite that, she was honest to her own detriment. With every word, she gave everything she had no matter how much it hurt her.

The distance between us wasn’t more than two feet, but it was made of cold air and wind. Hard, black asphalt and the density of the years. I couldn’t keep my hands away from her. I had to bridge time and the arm’s length of miles between us.

When I laid my hands on her arms, she stiffened and looked at me.

“Do you want me to go away?”

“No,” she whispered and relaxed into me.

I put my arms around her, and though coats and scarves and layers of fabric were between us, I could feel her heartbeat, the press of her fingertips on my back, and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

“I wish I’d come,” I said into her hair. “I was afraid it had been too long. But when Lance died…” I shook my head, struggling to put into words what he meant. “He was my last connection to Barrington.”

“I wish I could have seen him.” She pulled away enough to look at me. “Was he happy in New York?”

Was he? Had I ever asked myself that?

He was the harness that held me together. A bloodhound mutt with floppy ears and a child’s love was my connection to the boy I had been and the man I’d become. He was the reminder that I’d been a different man with a different future. He was the fork in the road. The opportunity to go back. The signpost away from loneliness and cold realities. Then time blew him away and I was left on a dark road disappearing into a point on the horizon. No more forks. No signposts.

But had he been happy?

He’d needed me and I’d needed him. That was all there was to it.

“He was a good boy.” I barely had the sentence out before I choked back a sob.

Catherine said nothing. I held her tight and rested my head on her shoulder, crying for my lost friend and everything he represented.