Chapter 8

The train carried Lucas through the rest of the night in a quiet fog. He watched the moon track across the sky, watched the snow fall and stop and fall again, watched the towns slide past — small clusters of light, one after another, each one a place where someone was waiting on a platform or standing at a window or maybe just sleeping, warm in their beds, unaware of the night he had just lived.

He checked his phone.

No messages.

He checked again, a minute later. Still nothing.

He told himself not to be anxious. She had come off the train to her mother, to the red scarf, to the whole complicated weight of the life she was stepping back into. She would text when she was ready. It had been — he looked at the clock — barely three hours since she’d gotten off. She was probably sitting in a kitchen right now, drinking tea, her mother asking if she’d eaten, her father reading a newspaper by the fire. She’d text when she had a moment.

Or she wouldn’t, and the night would have been the most beautiful one-time gift he’d ever received, and he would be okay.

He woke at the end of the line to the conductor tapping his shoulder. “End of the line, son.”

Lucas blinked. The cabin was empty. His coat was still on the hook. His scarf was there. The ticket was on the table beside his hand. He stood, packed his things, and stepped off into the cold grey of a winter dawn, the station small and quiet and entirely without ceremony.

He walked home in the gray light. His roommate was at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, looking up when he pushed through the door.

“How was the—“

“Don’t,” Lucas said.

The roommate raised an eyebrow. “That good?”

Lucas stood in the doorway of the tiny kitchen, the steam from his roommate’s coffee curling up toward the ceiling, his coat still buttoned, the night train still ringing through him.