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Of course, when he did finally get up, his father was standing there, squinting at him. “What were you doing on the floor?”

Leo’s jaw clenched. How was his father able to make even the most basic question sound like an accusation? “I was petting the dog.”

“It didn’t look like you were petting the dog.” Leo’s father—Joe, he was trying to think of him as Joe and not as Dad—crossed his arms. Leo fought the urge to cross his right back and stick out his tongue. Something about being back here at his dad’s—at Joe’s—really brought out the child in him. And not in a good way.

“What does it matter?”

Joe opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, then closed it. He sighed. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Do you want dinner?”

“I’m not hungry,” Leo said just as his stomach growled. Great timing. He made himself cough, like that might retroactively cover up the sound. “I’ll just eat later.”

Joe stared at him for another second. “All right.” He ambled back toward the kitchen, and Leo exhaled, his shoulders only now relaxing. He hadn’t even realized how bunched up they’d been, almost up to his ears.

He’d moved back here with Joe only because he had no other options. He and his mom had spent his remaining high school years living in Michigan with his grandfather and his new wife, who then both died while he was off at Michigan State (their deaths were both extremely sad and fell at just the right time to excuse him from two separate midterms). Only a few months later, his mom met an Italian guy on vacation who treated her like a queen, which she absolutely deserved after the shit his dad—Joe—had put her through. Except then suddenly she was selling the house they’d shared with his grandparents and moving to Italy with her new man and leaving him without a home base, which was fine, he was an adult; he could sublet an apartment during college breaks like an adult would.

Life was happening so fast in general, actually, and he couldn’t keep up, or at least that’s how he justified withdrawing from so many courses. He’d never been the world’s best student, and it had only been by a miracle (and his mom’s and grandfather’s legacy statuses) that he’d made it into Michigan State. He’d still been managing to keep a fairly respectable grade point average, but without his family there to check up on him, he’d found himself skipping class more and more, and pushing more and more of his work to the last minute, until he pushed it all so far it went off a cliff and he didn’t do it at all.

Not that he was trying to use his family’s absence as an excuse. He was an adult. He knew that. He was responsible for his own success and all that. It was more like…why? Why bother when he didn’t like doing any of it and when there was nobody left to hold him accountable?

Anyway, his advisor told him it was either withdraw or fail, and apparently a withdrawal looked better on his transcript than a big fat F, because he could always reenroll later. Except then he found his scholarships and student loans evaporating (because when you’d withdrawn from all your courses, you weren’t a student anymore), and he couldn’t afford to stay and reenroll. At some point he blinked and he was being kicked out of his dorm, and his choice was between paying all the money he had left in his bank account to make it a few months in a nearby friend’s spare room while he found a job or moving in with his dad.

He might not have been a student anymore, but leaving Michigan altogether would have felt like admitting he’d failed. So he ended up using the rest of his bank account on that spare room and getting a local job with vague hopes that he might make enough money to reenroll at some point once he felt more stable and finish his degree. But by the time those few months ended, his waitering job hadn’t made him enough money to pay for the next few months of his friend’s spare room, and he didn’t have the prospects of anything better without going back to school, and he couldn’t afford that. So he swallowed his pride, which landed in his stomach in one heavy, solid lump, and called Joe for the first time in years. It was either that or…nothing, really. He didn’t see how he could stay in Michigan, and maybe if he moved in with Joe and worked while saving as much as he could, eventually he could go back and finish school. When he felt more stable, as if that was something that might magically happen.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen or talked to Joe at all. He’d refused to grace Joe’s doorstep during his required custody times, and Joe didn’t go to the judge to force it (deciding, Leo figured, that trying to force a teenager to see him would only backfire on him). But Joe did fly out to Michigan a few times a year to take him out to lunch or to a baseball game or cheer him on at his high school graduation from the opposite side of the stands as his mom. The conversation was always stiff and awkward, and Leo usually cut their day or evening short with some blatant lie about wanting to study.

Joe tried. He really tried. But Leo couldn’t get over how, whenever he looked at his dad, his insides boiled with anger at his betrayal. Joe had thrown his whole life away—had thrown him away—for a woman who didn’t even stick around. He’d treated Leo’s mother, the best person Leo knew, like the slimy goo left in the gefilte fish jar after all the fish was gone.

But he had an extra bedroom, with Leo’s old bed still in it, and he didn’t ask for Leo to pay rent, so.

Leo sighed. He was pretty sure he had a protein bar buried somewhere on his desk upstairs. “C’mon, boy,” he called to Neptune, but no collar jingled in response. The dog had followed Joe into the kitchen, leaving Leo alone with his empty stomach.

Leo didn’t have work the next day, so he resolved to take Neptune on an epic walk in the woods instead of their usual quick jaunt around the neighborhood. Not because he was trying to avoid anyone in particular. Definitely not. Neptune was just a very good boy who deserved the best (despite the fact that, last night, when Leo had gone searching for his protein bar, all he’d found was a torn-open wrapper with beagle-shaped teeth marks in it. It had been peanut butter flavored, Leo’s favorite and apparently the dog’s as well). And also, because he was off work, Leo didn’t need to conserve his energy for the physical labor his job demanded. The main source of employment in the area for people without a college degree was a local warehouse for a huge online-shipping giant. It was easy to get hired there, and so that was what Leo did.

The three loopy streets where Leo’s and Shira’s families lived sat alongside a state park full of sandy trails and towering pine trees. It wasn’t one of the more popular parks, which was perfect for Leo’s taste; he preferred seeing nobody on their walks but the occasional equestrian or bounding deer. Neptune trotted along happily at his side, his long silky ears flapping in the chilly wind. In the summer, when it was hot, his tongue would loll out the side of his mouth.

God, no matter how much he loved that stupid beagle, Leo hoped he wasn’t still living here in the summer.

The jingling of Neptune’s collar and his occasional whuff kept away the birds and deer (though beagles had been bred for hunting, this particular one would make a terrible hunting dog), so Leo focused on the way the sunlight filtered through the trees and left dappled patterns on the ground, on the chill in the air that cut through his puffy jacket. He wished he’d brought a hat. He wished a lot of things, actually. Sometimes he wished he’d told Shira how he felt about her before he moved. Then maybe she wouldn’t have gradually faded away like fireworks after they fizzle out.

Or maybe it was better for her that he hadn’t. Because Joe had run into Shira’s mom the other day on the street, and apparently she hadn’t been able to stop gushing about how great Shira was doing. Dream job at a prestigious gallery, making moves with her own work, her own apartment in a major city.

And here he was, spinning his wheels like a car stuck in the mud, unable to move forward and also splattering everyone else around him. Usually he’d just tell himself Fuck them, what does it matter what they think?

But he couldn’t think that way about Shira. Which was why he just needed a few days to avoid seeing her, or maybe forever, or…

…nope, that was definitely her running in his direction right now.

He had a split second to decide if he was going to jump into the trees and hide, which seemed crazy but maybe not the worst idea he’d ever had. But then his traitorous dog barked high and excited, wagging his tail and straining at his leash, and that was that. “Shira? Is that you?”

She took out the one earbud she was wearing, her jog slowing into a walk slowing into a crouch before Neptune. She let him sniff her hand before stroking his ears.

Eight years hadn’t changed her much, at least that Leo could tell. She still had that prominent nose, her strongest feature, which he knew she’d always hated but that fit her face and gave her gravitas. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail, but he could tell from the way strands of it were escaping around her face that it was just as wild and untamable as it had been when she was a teenager. And he couldn’t avoid noticing the curves under her tight running sweatshirt, the way they swelled and nipped and—no, he was a gentleman. She said, “Leonard David, as I live and breathe.”

He winced, not just from the sound of his full first name (his mom had really loved Leonard Cohen, which was understandable, as the man was a musical genius, though it would have been nice if she’d loved him more like a middle name’s worth) but at what she must be seeing when she looked at him. Old sweatpants with a big hole that was only by chance not on the butt, greasy hair he hadn’t washed in too many days. “Eight years and you had to go there right away.”

She bounced back to her feet, smile big and toothy. “All of today’s babies have old-person names. Your parents were just ahead of the curve.”

“Well, I hope baby Gertrude and Milton appreciate it more than I did as a kid.” His forced smile turned into a real one, because man, he’d missed her. “How are you doing?”