“Grandma’s waiting.

And you and me have got a whole lot of lost time to start making up for.”

His truck was the same one he’d had before he left, older now, and we climbed into it the way we’d climbed into a hundred cars as kids, and for the first few miles neither of us said much.

There was a year of silence sitting in the cab with us, and it was too big to just wave away.

But then Ethan cleared his throat, at a red light, staring straight ahead through the windshield, and he said the thing I think he had come four thousand miles to say.