The specific smell of the end of the outdoor season. I saw him after school, Ren said. Dalton. Not on purpose, just in the parking lot. Boon looked at her.

He said he was sorry again. She said without an audience this time. He said the first time he’d had other people around and he wanted to say it when it was just the two of them. She was quiet a moment. I told him I knew that it didn’t fix things yet, but that it was a start.

That’s right, Boon said. He looked different, she said. Not happier. Lighter, maybe like something he’d been holding for a long time had been set down. She looked at her tea.

I don’t think he knows yet what kind of person he is when he’s not being the person Pierce made him. She paused. That’s going to take a while to find out. Boon thought about being 24 years old, the first time he’d understood that the options available to him were not limited to the ones someone else had decided on. How long it had taken him to actually believe it after understanding it.

How much happened in the space between understanding and believing? Yeah, he said it takes a while. Mom would have liked him. Ren said the actual him, not the Pierce version. She liked people who were trying.

Boon looked at his daughter. She liked Bob who were honest about what they were trying to do. He said that’s different from just trying. That’s what I said. Ren said.

She leaned her head against his shoulder briefly. Just a second. Then she sat back up. I’m going to make dinner, she said. You don’t have to.

I know I don’t have to, she said patient with him. Go inside. Sit down. He went inside, sat at the kitchen table, heard her behind him, the refrigerator, the stove, water running, the sounds of the house being lived in, which were he had come to understand in the 3 years since Callie died among the things he valued most in the world. He put his hands flat on the table and looked at them.

The silver ring, the grease that never fully came out, the old scar along the left thumb from 1993. He’d spent a long time looking at his hands and seeing the record of what he’d done, the history in them, the long complicated distance between who he’d been and who he was trying to be. Tonight, he looked at them and thought about Walt Callahan’s hands, which he’d never seen. Writing a summary sheet for someone who didn’t exist yet. About Ruth’s hands carrying a box in a garage for 9 years.