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“Great. I’m going to go get one.” And there she went, shouldering her way into the crowd. For a moment he wanted to go after her, serve as her shield. Because she’d spent years telling everyone about her art and her job and her life, they’d certainly start asking her about all that, putting her on the spot.

But of course he couldn’t go be her shield; he had to introduce Emily around. Not had to; that had come out the wrong way. He had the privilege of introducing his beautiful, smart, kind, funny girlfriend to all the people he’d grown up around. Right. That was better.

The next hour-ish passed in a flurry of introductions and snacks. The latkes from the catering company were good, but the ones Shira used to make were better. The latke cocktail the bartender made was better than Shira’s, but Leo would never let those words pass his lips. Some of his neighbors actually patted Leo on the back upon meeting Emily, which honestly made him feel a little gross, but everybody seemed to like her and she seemed to like everybody well enough that she didn’t run screaming out the door.

Emily was ensconced in an actually fascinating conversation about a scandal recently uncovered by the local paper (apparently the school board had been taking bribes from someone high up in the Peruvian government for years, the money laundered through a local mattress firm). And then: disaster. He noticed Talia sitting by herself in the corner, which in itself wasn’t unusual, since whenever she’d come over in the past she’d spend at least some time cloistered in the corner giving Neptune belly rubs. As if she were thinking the same thing, she said in a way that sounded as if she were accusing him of theft, “Where’s your dog?”

Where was his dog? He wasn’t in the kitchen begging for food or trying to jump up on the table when nobody could see him, which was the only other place Leo would have expected him to be. “If he gets too annoying around the food”—the specification was necessary because beagles were always at least a little annoying around food—“sometimes my dad sticks him in the bedroom so people can eat in peace.” But then they would’ve heard him howling with displeasure, and Leo didn’t hear anything except the Maccabeats rapping about Hanukkah.

Neptune wasn’t in the den. He wasn’t in the dining room. Half-panicked now, Leo found his dad holding court on the living room couch, drink in the air, clearly about to toast to something. “Dad,” Leo said, and his dad turned to him, lowering his glass. “Have you seen Neptune? I can’t find him anywhere.”

He wasn’t on the deck, which was Leo’s last hope. Leo cursed as Emily shook her head and his dad pressed his lips together hard. “He must have gotten out,” said his dad. “There were people going in and out all night. We should’ve taken better precautions.”

It was too late for that. No sense in wasting time on the could’ves would’ves should’ves. “He’s not chipped, is he?” Leo said.

His dad shook his head. “Unfortunately not.”

The words hung there in the cold air for a second, then dispersed into white mist. Again, no point in wasting time on wishing it had been done. “Okay,” Leo said. “Let’s split up and find him. Emily, you go up the street toward the cul-de-sac. Take some food with you, he’ll come running if he smells food. Chicken, ideally. Dad, you go toward the main road.” God, hopefully he didn’t find Neptune on the main road. “And I’ll go back into the woods. Text immediately if you find him, okay?”

Emily nodded, eyes resolute. His dad didn’t even nod, just turned and hustled away.

A few seconds later, Leo had a hunk of chicken in hand and his coat thrown over his shoulders—no time to put his arms in the sleeves—and was striding with his flashlight into the dark trees behind his house. The cheerful music coming from the lit windows faded the farther away he got. His stomach flip-flopped—there was a reason so many horror movies started with people camping alone in the woods at night. His tiny light barely penetrated the thick blackness ahead. Trees loomed above, branches silhouetted against the moon like skeleton fingers. Anything could be lurking behind them.

“Neptune? Here, boy,” he called out, partially so that the silence wouldn’t get overwhelming. In the summer the woods were thick with sound at night—the thrum of crickets and frogs, birds chirping at one another—but in the winter everything was bare and quiet. “Neptune, I have chicken.”

His feet crunched on dead pine needles and ice crystals, and he was about to admit defeat and head back—he couldn’t see anything, anyway—when he heard a tiny plaintive howl. “Neptune?” he called in its direction, hoping it was a beagle howl and not a wolf pup who would at first seem disarmingly cute and in need of help but whose mother would pounce upon him and tear him to shreds for daring to go near her baby.

“Leo?” That certainly wasn’t a beagle howl, no matter that his dad always insisted Neptune knew their names. Leo swung his flashlight in the direction of the voice. Light flashed over creaking ropes, ladder rungs, the plastic curve of a slide. The swing set, Leo realized, and then the light landed on Shira.

Shira squinted into the beam of the flashlight, shielding her eyes with one hand. She clutched the leash with the other, of course. She wasn’t going to let Leo’s dog run off.

Out of the darkness stepped Leo, a much gladder sight than the other things she’d worried might step out of the darkness and swallow her whole. His white button-down—which really should have been an ugly Hanukkah sweater, as was his right as party host—practically glowed from under his jacket. Neptune whuffed with surprised delight, his tail thumping the dirt between Shira’s feet. “There you are, boy.” Leo crouched before her to scratch the beagle’s head, setting the chicken before him, where it was downed immediately in one gulp. “We thought you’d run off.”

Oh, crap. Shira hadn’t thought to tell anyone where she was going when she found the poor dog pawing at the back door, tail between his legs, clearly needing to pee. “Sorry, sorry,” she said. “I should’ve told someone. He just looked like he needed to go out, and I really needed to get out too, so I figured we’d kill two birds with one stone.”

“No worries,” Leo said. “Let me just text my dad and Emily that I found him.” Emily. Of course Emily would’ve been out looking with him. He hesitated, glancing up from his phone. “I assume that when you say you needed to get out, it wasn’t to pee.”

“I’m a free woman,” said Shira. “I’ll pee wherever I want to.”

Leo hesitated again. He shrugged his coat, which was draped over his shoulders, down over his arms, then fully on. He took a seat on the swing beside her. It creaked in a way it never used to when they’d been kids. “Talk to me,” he said.

Over the past year, he’d grown his hair out a little more so that the curls were back, and a short beard, too, which she’d never seen on him. It didn’t quite fit him somehow, made him look both older and younger at the same time, depending on the angle. Something clenched inside her. It was like all the fears, worries, and pains of the last several months had clogged some vital tube in her chest, blocking the blood flow, and she didn’t know how to dislodge it. “It seems that I didn’t have everything figured out at twenty-two after all.”

“I don’t think anybody thinks twenty-two-year-olds have everything figured out,” Leo supplied. He sounded faintly amused, his tone deadpan. “Except maybe other twenty-two-year-olds.”

She swallowed, her throat dry. “I really thought I did, though. I had the dream job that I’d spent my whole life working toward. I had my painting, and I was really starting to succeed there. I had my group of friends, I had my city, I had everything.”

“You can still have the Hanukkah party,” Leo said. “I’m just keeping it warm for you.”

“But that’s the thing,” she said. “Every year I told myself, you have the Hanukkah party, that’s how you’re connected to your Jewishness. But I stopped doing everything else. I haven’t belonged to a synagogue in years. I haven’t been to a Passover seder since I moved out to LA, since it’s too expensive to take time off work and fly home for a few days. I could’ve gone to a seder with a colleague or at the local Chabad, but I didn’t. I haven’t even fasted on Yom Kippur. Hanukkah isn’t actually an important holiday, you know, it’s just that non-Jews think it’s the most important holiday for us because it’s right around Christmas. And yet I turned it into my most important holiday. What does that say about me?”

He stayed silent. Which was good, really. She didn’t think she wanted to hear him answer that.

She dragged her toes through the dirt. Even after all these years, the soil beneath the swing was still shaped like a little valley. It hadn’t forgotten them. “That’s the real reason I didn’t want to host this year,” she said quietly. “Because it was just one more performance for the rest of the world. Beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside. Like me.” She immediately felt silly. “That was just a metaphor. I’m not trying to say that I’m beautiful or—”

“You are, though.” He said it simply, just as a breeze brushed her cheek. Her heart skipped a beat, and she tried to tell herself it was the chill of the wind, but it didn’t work even for a second.

Leo David telling her she was beautiful. She touched her lips, remembering the feeling of his on hers so many years ago. She hadn’t thought about their kiss in ages, and to her surprise, the memory didn’t bring back the mortification she remembered feeling. Or had it been mortification right away? Hadn’t she lost herself in it for a moment, sunk into him, before her brain yanked her out of it and told her he wasn’t good enough?