He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, but eventually the damp gray of the afternoon faded into the hazy blue of early evening. Dinner was leftover stew, reheated on the stove without much ceremony. Jack didn’t come in until it was already on the table, ate in silence, and was back out the door before either Robby or Dennis had even finished eating.

Dennis stared down at his own half-eaten bowl, spoon scraping the bottom, no longer hungry.

By the time Robby walked him back to the spare room, Dennis could feel the exhaustion of the last several days catching up to him. Hitchhiking, hustling for money or food, catnapping at truck stops with one eye open—he’d been running on pure adrenaline since he hit the Pennsylvania state line.

His clothes had long since finished drying by that point, and he was used to sleeping in his jeans, but when he tried to give Jack’s things back to Robby, Robby just waved him off.

“Keep that stuff to sleep in if you want,” he said. “Jack won’t miss them.”

Dennis looked down at the shirt and sweatpants hanging off his frame and felt that same surge of something hot and shameful in his gut at the thought of actually sleeping in Jack’s clothes.

Shoving those feelings back into the dark where they belonged, Dennis glanced around the room that would be his for the night. It looked like a typical cabin bedroom, small and cozy. There was a bed in one corner with an iron frame and another of the sigil-stitched quilts like Dennis had seen on the sofa. Dennis’s backpack was already on the bed, unzipped. He glanced at Robby.

“Had to make sure you weren’t coming in here armed,” Robby said with a shrug.

That made sense, Dennis thought, even if the violation of it made the skin between his shoulders itch. Not that there was much snooping to be done; the only things he had to his name outside the clothes on his back were his mother’s journal and the pocketknife she’d given him for his sixteenth birthday—a knife he now watched Robby take out of his pocket, twirling it in his hand.

“I’m going to give this back to you,” he said, holding the knife up. “With the caveat that if you use it on me, Jack will shoot you. Understand?”

Swallowing, Dennis nodded, and Robby tossed the pocketknife to him. For a moment, Dennis did imagine what would happen if he used it—how far he would get before Jack found out what had happened, how quickly he would find Dennis after—but felt guilty almost immediately. Sarah had given him the knife for protection, yes, but Robby had been kind to him so far. Kinder than he should have been, all things considered, and far kinder than Dennis was used to.

“There are extra blankets in the chest at the end of the bed if you get cold,” Robby continued, nodding toward it, the words casual, as though they hadn’t followed a direct threat on Dennis’s life. “The window sticks a little, but it opens if you want air. I’d crack it—gets stuffy in here otherwise.”

“Okay.” Dennis hovered near the bed, unsure of what to do with himself. He gripped the pocketknife in his hand, turning it over in his palm in a self-soothing gesture he’d picked up over the years.

Robby lingered in the doorway for a moment, and for the first time since Dennis had arrived, some of the easy confidence that Robby had carried for most of the day seemed to drain from him, leaving him looking almost lost. Like he was trying to work out if he wanted to say something or leave it alone.

“For what it’s worth,” he finally said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I know today probably wasn’t…” He trailed off, shaking his head as he let out a breath. “I know you probably imagined it going differently, finally meeting your dad.”

Dennis huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “It’s fine,” he said. It was his fault, really, for building up Jack as some mythic figure in his mind. The disappointment that Jack was just a man—human, emotionally stunted—was on him.

“It’s not,” Robby said, gently enough that it didn’t feel like an argument. “But it’s the best we can do tonight. We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.”

He pushed himself away from the door frame, but then paused, looking back at Dennis with an expression he couldn’t quite discern.

“He’s not a bad man,” Robby said, and Dennis had to fight not to scoff. “He’s got thick armor, but underneath that, he’s…”

“Soft and gooey?” Dennis couldn’t help the sarcasm. Robby gave him a reproachful look, and the expression was so—so fatherly that it made Dennis’s breath catch. It felt like Robby was disappointed in him, and for some reason, that made Dennis’s gut twist anxiously.

“Worth it,” Robby said, with the conviction of a man who believed absolutely in what he was saying. “Trust me—took me a while to see it myself. You’re not going to get there in an afternoon.”

Dennis didn’t know what to do with that, so he just nodded, his throat suddenly tight.

Robby seemed to take the nod for what it was. He patted the doorjamb once, and then pushed away from it for good.

“Holler if you need anything,” he said, stepping back into the hallway. “There are extra towels in the hall closet if you want to take a shower. Takes it a minute to warm up—old pipes—but don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s broken.”

“Okay,” Dennis managed around the lump in his throat. “Thank you,” he added after a moment. “For, um. You know. Everything.”

Robby gave him a small, almost sad smile. A smile that for the first time since Dennis had met the man wasn’t trying to be anything other than it was: an apology, an acknowledgement, avoiding promises of the future because there was no guarantee that Dennis would still be here this time tomorrow. Dennis appreciated the honesty in it if nothing else.

With a nod, Robby left, pulling the door closed behind him—only he left it cracked a couple of inches, perhaps out of some instinct that Dennis didn’t want to examine too closely.

For the first time since he had arrived at the cabin, Dennis was well and truly alone. He could hear Robby moving around in the kitchen, and if he looked out the single window of his temporary room, he could see the light on in the workshop still, Jack’s silhouette dark against the fluorescent glow.

With a sigh, Dennis sat down on the bed and reached for his opened backpack. He slipped his knife back into its regular pocket first, and then grabbed his mother’s journal, left undisturbed at the bottom of the bag beneath his worn-out thrift store coat and extra pairs of socks and underwear.

At least Robby had afforded him some privacy, he thought, as he removed the journal.

The worn cover was familiar beneath his fingertips, the pages yellowed and warped with two decades of handling, spilled drinks, rain, cigarette ash. The spine was cracked in such a way that the book fell open automatically on his lap to the entry where his mother had described meeting Jack for the first time. He’d read those words so many times that he could recite them by heart now, the scene playing out in his head like a movie: Sarah being stalked through the cornfields of her family’s farm by some unnamed, unnatural thing. Running into Jack, brash and handsome and too flirty for his own good.

Now, with his newfound knowledge of why Jack had ended up in Broken Bow, alone, Dennis couldn’t help but wonder if the scene so lovingly written out by his mother in her journal had actually happened as penned, or if there had been some…embellishment on her part.

To a young, inexperienced girl from rural Nebraska, Jack might very well have seemed flirty, and surely the possibility of him being gay or bi or whatever he was wouldn’t have crossed Sarah’s mind at the time, but now Dennis wasn’t sure how much of what she had described between herself and Jack had been real, and how much of it had been wishful thinking by a young girl with an—admittedly understandable—crush on the man who had saved her life?

Dennis didn’t know Jack, but he knew his mother. He was sure Sarah wouldn’t have done anything with Jack if she had known he had a partner.

“I think you would have liked Robby,” he muttered to himself, fingertips brushing the brittle pages. “He seems kind. Jack…” Dennis paused and let out a slow breath. “I don’t think he’s the man you met back then. I don’t know if he ever was.”

He traced his mother’s handwriting for a moment, waiting for… he wasn’t sure what. Some sign that she was still with him, maybe. But there was nothing, no sound except for the soft patter of rain on the metal roof, and Robby milling around in the kitchen.

With a sigh, Dennis returned the journal to his backpack, and then stood in a sudden bout of restlessness. He was tired, yes, but almost too tired to sleep, afraid that the moment his head hit the pillow he would be wide awake. He’d always been a light sleeper, especially in unfamiliar places.

He took a turn around the room, cataloguing the details he’d only half-noted when he first walked in. The worn rug underfoot. The quilt with its sewn protections. An unbroken line of salt on the windowsill. There was nothing in the chest at the foot of the bed but extra blankets, just like Robby had said. It was a perfectly ordinary room, but the lack of any homey touches like the rest of the cabin, and the warning from Robby, made it feel more like a prison cell.

Wandering back to the window, Dennis leaned against it, careful not to disturb the salt as he stared out at the workshop in the distance, Jack still working on whatever he was doing to avoid coming back into the house. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but eventually the light in the workshop went out, plunging the yard into darkness. He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and after a moment he could see Jack leaving the workshop, pulling down the garage door and locking everything up for the night. He trekked across the muddy ground with the same uneven gait as before, making Dennis wonder idly if Jack had been injured at some point in the past.

The thought disturbed him, and he realized it was because he had built up Jack so much in his mind that the idea of something hurting him—of a hunt going bad, or even a mundane accident—seemed almost unnatural. He was supposed to be invincible, but of course he wasn’t. Nobody was.

A few yards from the house, Jack stopped. Dennis held his breath, waiting, watching as Jack stared up at the cabin. He wondered what Jack was thinking about. It was too dark to make out the expression on Jack’s face, but then he turned his head, looking directly at the window where Dennis was standing.

Gasping, Dennis stepped aside, flattening himself against the wall. Had Jack seen him? Of course he saw you, he told himself, don’t be stupid. He could feel himself flush with embarrassment at the idea of Jack catching him staring. Embarrassment, and something far worse, something blooming warm in his gut at the idea of Jack knowing Dennis was watching him.

Slowly, he crept back to the window, fingers curling around the frame as he peeked outside. Jack was still standing there, but to Dennis’s relief he wasn’t looking towards the window anymore. Still, he stayed hidden, watching until the tense line of Jack’s shoulders finally relaxed and he made his way into the house.

Dennis heard the door open, heard Jack and Robby’s muffled voices through the wall, and then the sound of their heavy footsteps as they retreated to their bedroom, just across the hall.

Knowing that he, too, needed to rest, especially if Jack and Robby were going to send him on his way in the morning, Dennis settled back on the bed, his fingers brushing the embroidered sigils of the quilt before crawling underneath it. He closed his eyes, feeling the exhaustion of the past few weeks—the past few months, really—pulling him under, and for a blissful moment, he felt himself drift off—

—only to jolt awake a few seconds later as the cabin settled.