I was simply Colin Carter again, twelve years old, watching my brother dare me to jump from the old wooden dock into water we both knew was too cold.
“That’s your dad?” I finally managed hb.
The boy nodded.
“His name is Logan?”
Another nod.
My throat tightened.
“What’s your name?”
“Eli.”
He said it cautiously, as though he had begun to realize I wasn’t reacting the way adults usually reacted to photographs bh.
“Eli!”
A woman’s voice carried down the sidewalk.
The boy turned.
A woman hurried toward us from the doorway of a nearby café, holding a small paper bag in one hand. She couldn’t have been much past thirty. Her brown hair had been gathered quickly behind her head, and her expression held the unmistakable concern of a parent who had looked away for half a minute and discovered that half a minute was enough.
“There you are.”
She reached Eli, rested both hands gently on his shoulders, then looked up at me.
“I’m sorry, Officer. He was right beside the window. I was paying for breakfast and—”
“It’s all right,” I said. “He stayed right here.”
Eli held up the photograph.
“I found Uncle Colin.”
The woman went perfectly still.
I heard those two words more clearly than anything else around us.
Uncle Colin.
Her gaze dropped to my forearm.
Then she looked at my face again.
“Oh,” she said softly.
That single syllable told me she knew exactly who I was.
“You know me?”
She drew in a breath.
“My name is Rachel.”
I waited.
“Rachel Bennett.”
The name meant nothing at first.
Then somewhere in the back of my memory, a door opened.
Logan had mentioned a Rachel once.
Years ago.
Not often. My brother had never been the kind of person who talked freely about relationships until he knew they mattered. But sometime during the final year before we stopped speaking, he had mentioned a woman he had met through a friend.
Rachel.
I stared at her.
“You and Logan…”
“We’re married.”
The words landed quietly.
Maybe that was what made them so powerful.
There was no dramatic announcement, no warning, no time to prepare.
My brother was married.
My brother had a son.
My brother had built an entire life while I had been moving through mine believing he wanted nothing to do with me.
I looked at Eli again.
Suddenly the familiarity in his eyes made sense.
They were our mother’s eyes.
Gray with a narrow ring of blue around the iris.
People used to stop my mother in grocery stores and tell her how unusual they were. Logan had inherited them more strongly than I had.
Now they were looking up at me from the face of a five-year-old boy.
“How old are you, Eli?”
He held up five fingers.
“Five.”
Rachel glanced toward him.
“Why don’t you finish your muffin at the table by the window? I’ll be right there.”
Eli looked uncertain.
“Can Uncle Colin come?”
The word hit me again.
Rachel gave me a brief, apologetic look.
“If he wants to.”
I should have said something sensible.
Instead, I heard myself say, “I’d like that.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting outside the café with a radio on my shoulder, a coffee I had forgotten to drink, and a nephew I had learned existed less than fifteen minutes earlier.
Eli sat across from me, carefully breaking a blueberry muffin into pieces and arranging them according to some system understood only by him.
Rachel sat beside him.
For a while, none of us knew where to begin.
Finally, I placed the photograph on the table.
“When was this taken?”
“Last October,” Rachel said.
I looked up sharply.
That meant Logan had looked like this less than a year ago.
It meant the photograph wasn’t some old image Eli carried because his father belonged to the past.
“He’s okay?”
Rachel understood the question immediately.
“He’s fine.”
The relief that moved through me embarrassed me with its force.
I hadn’t realized how many terrible explanations my mind had assembled in the previous few minutes.
“He works for a building restoration company,” she continued. “Mostly old houses and public buildings. He’s been with them six years.”
“Where?”
“Millhaven.”
I stared at her.
Millhaven was forty minutes away.
Forty minutes.
For years, I had imagined Logan somewhere across the country. Maybe Seattle. Maybe Denver. Maybe one of the dozen places we had talked about when we were twenty and certain adulthood meant leaving everything familiar behind.
Forty minutes away.
“How long has he lived there?”
“Almost seven years.”
I looked out toward the street.
A bus rolled past.
Someone laughed outside a bakery across the intersection.
The ordinary world continued without noticing that mine had shifted.
Rachel folded her hands around her coffee.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not sure I know what I’m thinking.”
“That’s fair.”
“Does Logan know you’re here?”
Her pause answered before she did.
“No.”
I leaned back.
“Then why are you here?”
Eli looked up from his muffin.
Rachel lowered her voice slightly.
“We’re visiting someone.”
“Who?”
She hesitated again.
That hesitation was beginning to bother me.
“Your father.”
I stared at her.
“My father?”
“Yes.”
“My father knows you?”
Rachel’s expression changed.
Not guilt.
Something closer to regret.
“Colin, I think there are things you and Logan both believe about the last several years that aren’t entirely true.”
My hand tightened around the untouched coffee cup.
“What does that mean?”
She glanced toward Eli.
He was watching a pigeon investigate the edge of the sidewalk.
“Probably more than we should discuss while you’re working.”
“I’m listening.”
“I know.”
She offered a small, tired smile.
“And I can see that you’re very good at making people answer questions.”
Under different circumstances I might have laughed.
I didn’t.
Rachel sighed.
“Your father has seen Logan.”
“When?”
“Several times.”
The café sounds seemed to fade.
“Recently?”
“Yes.”
“How recently?”
“Three weeks ago.”
I looked down at the photograph.
Then I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before.
At the far edge of the picture, beyond the picnic tables, stood an older man in a blue jacket.
Only part of his face was visible.
But I knew that jacket.
I had given it to my father for his sixty-fifth birthday.
I brought the photograph closer.
My father was there.
Standing no more than twenty feet from Logan.
My brother.
The son he had repeatedly told me he hadn’t heard from in years.
I remembered conversations with Dad.
Not many.
Never long.
He and I were close in some ways and strangely formal in others. After Mom died, we had both become experts at discussing practical matters while stepping neatly around anything painful.
Whenever Logan’s name came up, Dad answered with some variation of the same sentence.
He seems to be doing all right.
