Logan and me at seventeen.
Standing beside Dad’s old pickup.
Both of us sunburned.
Both laughing.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because Logan came here three weeks ago looking for something.”
“What?”
Dad reached deeper into the box.
“The original drawing.”
My eyes moved automatically to my tattoo.
I had nearly forgotten.
The design had started on a piece of paper.
Mom drew it.
Not professionally.
Just absentmindedly.
She used to doodle when talking on the phone. One evening, when Logan and I were twenty-one, she had drawn two winding lines that crossed and separated before meeting again.
Logan saw it and said it looked like us.
Mom laughed.
“Then hopefully you meet again more than you separate.”
Years later, Logan and I took that scrap of paper to a tattoo artist and asked him to turn it into something permanent.
Dad placed the old sheet on the table.
There it was.
Faded blue ink.
Two lines.
Crossing.
Separating.
Returning.
I touched the edge.
“Logan wanted this?”
“He asked whether I still had it.”
“Why?”
Dad looked at me.
“He wouldn’t say.”
I studied the drawing.
In the lower corner was something I had never noticed before.
Mom’s handwriting.
Tiny.
Almost hidden under the edge where the paper had once been folded.
C + L.
Then beneath that:
You don’t have to walk the same road to belong to the same family.
I swallowed.
“Did Logan see this?”
Dad nodded.
“He sat where you’re standing for almost ten minutes.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.”
I imagined my brother in this room three weeks earlier.
Holding the same page.
Thinking whatever I was thinking now.
“Then why did Rachel come here today?”
“She wasn’t supposed to.”
I looked at Dad.
“What?”
“Logan doesn’t know.”
“She told me that.”
Dad sat slowly on the old desk chair.
“She called me yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re moving.”
That caught me off guard.
“Where?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Logan’s been offered a job supervising restoration projects in Vermont. It’s a good position. Rachel thinks he’s going to accept.”
My first reaction surprised me.
No.
Not because Vermont was far.
Because I had just learned my brother was forty minutes away.
I wasn’t ready for him to become hundreds of miles away again before I had decided what to do.
“When?”
“Six weeks.”
I stared at the tattoo design.
“Does he want to go?”
“Professionally, yes.”
“And personally?”
Dad gave a faint shrug.
“I think that’s why he came looking for this.”
For the first time, I understood Rachel’s visit differently.
She hadn’t brought Eli into town to force a reunion.
She had come because something was about to change.
Maybe she believed two stubborn brothers were running out of convenient tomorrows.
“Do you have Logan’s number?”
Dad nodded.
“Give it to me.”
He reached for his phone.
Then I stopped him.
“No.”
Dad looked up.
I wasn’t sure why I had changed my mind.
Maybe because a number felt too easy.
Maybe because after seven years, I didn’t want our first conversation reduced to hearing him say hello while I searched for words.
“Do you know where he works tomorrow?”
“I think so.”
I looked at the old drawing.
“Tell me.”
Dad hesitated.
“Colin, don’t go there angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
That wasn’t completely true.
But it wasn’t completely false either.
I was angry at Logan.
At Dad.
At myself.
Mostly at seven years that could never be returned.
“I just want to see him.”
Dad wrote an address.
An old library in Millhaven.
Logan’s company was restoring the building’s original windows and exterior trim.
I folded the paper into my pocket.
Before leaving, I took a photograph of Mom’s drawing.
Then Dad said something that stopped me at the doorway.
“There’s one more thing.”
I turned.
He was holding an envelope.
Cream colored.
My name was written across the front.
COLIN.
I recognized the handwriting immediately.
Logan’s.
The envelope had been opened.
Not by Dad.
The flap was torn neatly along the top.
“When did he give you that?”
“He didn’t.”
Dad held it out.
“He wrote it here three weeks ago.”
I took it.
