Here was a haggard man with a receding hairline who looked, at this moment, at least a decade older than his thirty years. He’d put on weight since Barbara left and it was beginning to show —a bulge of belly and a softness around his face. But it was the expression that made the image in the mirror seem so ancient. He had seen it on old men riding buses. A frown that announces surrender, the willing embrace of defeat. Options for tonight?

He could stare out the window, into his past; or into this mirror, the future.

The two had intersected here. Here at the crossroads. This rainy old town.

He turned to the window.

Welcome back.

Doug Archer called in the morning to announce that Tom’s offer on the house—most of his carefully hoarded inheritance, tendered in cash—had been accepted. “Possession is immediate. We can have all the paperwork done by the end of the day. A few signatures and she’s all yours.”

“Would it be possible to get the key today?”

“I don’t see any problem with that.”

Tom drove down to the realty office next to the Harbor Mall. Archer escorted him through paperwork at the in-house Notary Public, then took him across the street for lunch. The restaurant was called El Nino—it was new; the location used to be a Kresge’s, if Tom recalled correctly. The decor was nautical but not screamingly kitschy.

Tom ordered the salmon salad sandwich. Archer smiled at the waitress. “Just coffee, Nance.”

She nodded and smiled back.

“You’re not wearing your realty jacket,” Tom said.

“Technically, it’s my day off. Plus, you’re a solid purchase. And what the hell, you’re a hometown boy, I don’t have to impress anybody here.” He settled back in the vinyl booth, lean in his checkerboard shirt, his long hair a little wilder than he had worn it the day before. He thanked the waitress when the coffee arrived. “I looked into the history of the house, by the way. My own curiosity, mainly.”