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"When is Zoe coming for another sleepover?"

The center of my chest warmed. "I don't know yet."

James took this under serious consideration. "Because I want to show her something."

"What do you want to show her?"

"My Ankylosaurus. The one with the moving tail." He held up the toy took everywhere. "It has an armored skull and a club tail. Zoe didn't know Ankylosaurus was basically a living tank."

"Most people don't."

"She would want to know. She asks good questions."

I looked at the road ahead.

"She does," I agreed.

"And she's funny." A pause. "But not in a fake way. Sometimes Mrs. Hearly from back home was fake."

“Who was Mrs. Hearly?”

“She was the lady that Grandma Sharon kept saying she wanted you to be friends with. She came over sometimes. You met her once, and you were fake nice to her. It was funny.”

I racked my brain to remember who he was talking about, but I came up blank.

Instead, I thought about Zoe sitting at my kitchen table while James had been explaining the finer points of Cretaceous period taxonomy. He was right, she hadn’t been fake.

"No," I said. "Zoe isn’t fake."

James seemed satisfied with this assessment.

I drove home with the windows cracked and the radio off.

After James was asleep, I sat at the kitchen table with a beer I hadn't opened and my phone in my hand.

The elevation drawings were still where I'd left them, pencil still on the floor. I decided to pick it up tomorrow.

I called Renzo.

He picked up on the second ring. "Everything all right?"

"Yeah." I turned the beer bottle in my hand. "Question."

"Go ahead."

"Do you ever regret it? Settling here?"

Renzo paused as he gave the question real thought.

"No," he said. "But not because of Jasper Creek specifically." I could hear him shift, the low sound of a chair or a couch creaking on his end. "Home isn't a place for me. It's Millie. Wherever she is, that's where I want to be. If she'd wanted to live in London, or Egypt, or bumfuck wherever, I'd have built my whole life there. She wanted Jasper Creek, and now I can't imagine it differently."

I was quiet for a moment.

"Adam." His voice was even. "Whatever question you're actually asking yourself, I think you already know the answer."

He was right, I probably did.

We talked for another few minutes, just shooting the shit.