Inside the farmhouse, Mara sat on the sofa with Eli curled beside her. She had told him his father was coming, but had been careful not to promise what the reunion would feel like. Eli's excitement arrived in waves. One moment he asked whether Evan still liked old motorcycles; the next he asked whether eight years of absence could make a person forget a child's face. Mara answered what she could and admitted when she did not know.
"Will he know I'm me?" Eli asked.
"He knows your name," she said. "He knows you exist, and he's wanted to know you for a long time. But he hasn't met you since you were a baby. Both of you are going to learn things about each other."
"What if he doesn't like how I talk?"
"Then he'll have to get used to it," Mara said with a firmness that made Cole smile from across the room. "I happen to think the way you talk is one of your better qualities."
Eli considered that. "What if I'm angry?"
"Then you're angry. It doesn't make you bad. It doesn't mean you love him any less, and it doesn't mean you have to pretend the last eight years were easy."
Cole looked away. Mara was giving her son permission to feel something difficult without feeling responsible for the adults around him. She had clearly fought hard to learn that herself. He wished someone had taught him the same thing when he was young.
A truck arrived a little after two in the morning. There were no dramatic sirens or rushing footsteps, just the soft noise of tires on gravel and a door shutting in the cold. Cole went outside before anyone else. He stood near the gate and watched a man climb down from the passenger side, one hand on the vehicle for balance.
Evan Rowan was forty-one and looked older. His hair was threaded with gray, his face leaner, and his movements had the practiced caution of someone who was rarely comfortable being observed. He wore a plain jacket over a dark shirt. There was no compass patch on his chest. Cole recognized the way he held his head before he recognized the face: slightly tilted, listening, already preparing a joke to make an uncomfortable moment easier.
They stood several paces apart. The years between them seemed briefly visible in the cold air.
"You look terrible," Evan said.
"You've lost weight," Cole answered. "And apparently your sense of humor."
"Still got enough to recognize an ugly face."
Cole stepped forward. Evan did the same. Their embrace was brief, fierce, and without ceremony. For a few moments Cole felt the shape of his old friend beneath a different set of bones, and the knowledge that Evan was real moved through him with greater force than anything Darla's recordings had produced.
When they separated, Evan wiped one hand across his eyes without pretending he had something in them. He looked toward the farmhouse window. "She's inside."