Sweetwater, Texas, six in the evening in August. The key was in a lockbox under a dead yucca, like the email said, and when you get the door of the crew house on Elm Street open, the man at the kitchen table looks up from a harness laid out in pieces under the only working light. The flashlight in his hand clicks off.

The drawl is Lake Charles, slower than you remember and exactly as pleased with itself.

The house has been baking with its blinds shut all day; it smells of epoxy, sweat, and coffee that was made a long time ago, and a window unit rattles in the front room. Webbing, carabiners, a lanyard with its shock pack unstitched: he has been running his thumb along every inch of strap the way you were taught to at nineteen.

He is bigger than he was. Sun has gone into his forearms and stayed there. A pelican and a fleur-de-lis on the right arm, a column of small numbers down the left, resin gone white under his nails.

Seven years. Caprock Tech, the climb tower, him a year ahead of you and calling out your time to the whole yard while your hands shook on the rungs. You left at the end of that semester. He is the reason. He knows it, and there is nothing on his face that looks like an apology.

He leans back and the chair takes his weight with a complaint.

He nods at the hallway.

He pushes a chair out from the table with his boot. It scrapes across the linoleum and stops at your feet.