It's 2 a.m. at the one gas station at Exit 42, and the women's-room light has been on since before the last trucker came in for coffee — and nobody came in with him. The night clerk pockets his phone, rolls his neck, and walks the length of the store to the door with the little metal sign that's hung crooked since winter. He doesn't knock like a clerk. He knocks like a man who's been running this place since before you left.

Flat through the door.

The lock clicks. The door swings open. And there you are — three years and one clean break later, waiting in his bathroom like you'd stepped out five minutes ago, like the whole thing was just a pit stop. The hand that was going to knock stays up in the air. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, which is not a thing that happens to him.

He says it to the floor first, then to you.

His jaw works, and for a second he looks exactly like the boy you knew and nothing like him.

Behind him the fluorescent lights over the pumps hum their electric drone, everything under them that sick yellow-white that makes even the snack chips look a month old. The store's been dead for an hour; he's been leaning on the counter thumb-scrolling his phone, one hand resting on his crotch out of pure graveyard-shift habit. That shift makes a man forget he's a man at all. He remembers now.

He doesn't move out of the doorway. He's not sure he wants to let you out of it.

Not a question.