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The seat was uncomfortable in that particular way Greyhound seats always are; too upright, too close to the one in front, the armrest digging into your side no matter which way you shifted. I’d been on this bus for going on sixteen hours. My back ached. My mouth tasted like gas station coffee and bad decisions.

I didn’t care about any of that.

I was watching Oregon slide past the window in long, flat stretches of sage and dust, and I was thinking about Andy.

I don’t know how to explain what it’s like to carry a person with you for a decade without them knowing. To have someone take up permanent, rent-free residence somewhere inside your head, quiet most days, then suddenly so loud you can’t hear anything else. That’s what Andy had always been for me. A frequency I couldn’t tune out.

The last time I’d seen him in person, he’d been standing outside the airport drop of where he’d be boarding a flight cross country. He’d hugged me for a long time. I can still feel his broad shoulders wrapped around me and my face pressed against his t-shirt stretched across his chest. I still hear him whisper in my ear that this is not the end of us. Longer than goodbye usually is. I remember thinking that if I didn’t let go first, he never would. So I let go first.

He ran to catch his plane. I went back to our place alone.

That was almost ten years ago.

He had a way of moving through a room that made you aware of the room.

That’s the thing I kept coming back to on that bus, drifting in and out of something that wasn’t quite sleep. You’d see him, really see him, and something in your body registered the information before your brain did. He was built the way serious athletes are built when they’ve been working since they were teenagers, not in a gym with mirrors but in the actual world, hauling things, using their whole body for actual labor. Swimmer’s shoulders, fisherman’s hands. Six feet of someone who had never once been soft.

But that wasn’t even the half of it.

It was the way he laughed. The way he could be rough and easy at the same time, like a man who’d figured out that the world responded better to him when he wasn’t performing anything. He just was. He took up the exact amount of space he needed and never apologized for it, and somehow that made you want to give him more.

Being with Andy had been like being turned on at a frequency I didn’t know I received.

I had not known, before him, what it felt like to actually want something. Not in that way. Not where your whole body is involved in the wanting and you can’t separate out which part of you is asking. I had not known that before, and I have not felt it since, and there is something both clarifying and devastating about that kind of knowledge once you have it.

You can’t unknow it. You can just live with the absence of it.

I must have actually slept somewhere outside of Portland, because when I came back to myself the window had gone dark and my cheek was against the cold glass and I was thinking about his hands.

Not thinking, exactly. Dreaming with my eyes almost open. The particular way he’d reach for me; not hesitant, never tentative, like he’d already decided and was just following through on something settled. Like I was his. Something he’d already chosen and kept choosing, every time.

Those two years.

God, those two years.

There are stretches of your life that don’t seem like they should be able to fit all the living they contain. Two years sounds like nothing. Two years with Andy was its own country, its own climate system, its own laws of physics. We cooked together at midnight because neither of us had normal schedules. We drove nowhere in particular and played music too loud and talked about everything and nothing, that particular kind of conversation where you’re not actually trying to get anywhere, you’re just staying in the feeling of being known.

He made me reckless. Not in the way that means careless; in the way that means free. Like I could stop calculating the distance between where I was and where it was safe, and just stand somewhere and be there.

I missed that version of myself almost as much as I missed him.

The bus stopped in a town whose name I didn’t catch. A few people got off. A vending machine light flickered on the platform. I pressed my forehead to the glass and thought: what are you doing?

No answer came, which I took as permission to continue.

Here was what I knew: he’d been in Hermiston, Oregon. I’d found a fragment of something online; not much, he’d never been a person who lived his life on the internet. A mention, a location tag someone else had used, a name that fit. It was thin. It was the kind of evidence that would embarrass you if you had to explain it to someone rational.

But I was past rational. I had been past rational for a while now. I had done everything the rational way and wound up alone in a state I didn’t like, starting over from scratch, building something out of nothing because there was nothing else to build from. I had been practical and patient and I had waited and I had survived things that should have broken me.

And I had done all of it without ever quite being able to forget about Andy.

So.

The risk of not trying seemed larger than the risk of trying and failing. The idea of never seeing him again; of just letting that be the end of it, the airport, the too-long hug, me letting go first. It seemed worse than whatever I might find when I got off this bus. Worse than going to a strange town and not finding him there. Worse than crashing and burning and starting over again.

I could survive starting over. I’d done it before.

I wasn’t sure I could survive never knowing.

I slept again somewhere past the Columbia River, and this time I dreamed something that wasn’t quite memory and wasn’t quite invention; him, close, that particular warmth that was specifically his, the way things always felt more possible in proximity to him, like the his confidence was contagious and rubbed off on me.

I woke up when the driver announced the stop.

Hermiston.

It was smaller than I expected and exactly as small as I should have expected. One of those towns that exists functionally; a gas station, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a few streets that branch off the main one and then just stop. The sky above it was enormous the way Western skies are, like the land can’t quite fill up all the space the sky is offering.

I stood on the sidewalk with my bag and let the bus pull away behind me.

Somewhere in this town, maybe, was Andy.

Somewhere in this town, maybe, I was about to humiliate myself entirely.

I needed coffee. I needed food. I needed somewhere to sit and think about what on earth I was going to do next.

Down the block, past a barbershop and a place that seemed to sell farm equipment, there was a diner.

It didn’t look like much from the outside. It didn’t look like much from the inside, either. Vinyl booths, laminate tables, a counter with stools that had seen better days, a hand-lettered specials board above the pass-through window. A smell, though. That smell hit me before the door had swung fully open.

Real food. The smell of something made from scratch, something that had taken time, something that somebody cared about.

I sat down in a booth by the door.

The woman who came to take my order looked to be somewhere north of seventy, small and wire-tough, with white hair pinned up and a look on her face like she’d heard every story a person could have and had an opinion about most of them. She moved through that diner like she owned the building, the block, and anyone who walked into either.

She set down a coffee without asking. Good instincts.

“You need a minute?” she said, not unkindly, but in a way that made clear she had a finite amount of minutes available for distribution.

“What’s good?” I asked.

She looked at me for a moment; assessing something. Then she said, “The lamb pastie. You won’t find it anywhere else.”

I had never heard of a lamb pastie. The menu described it as a hand-formed pastry filled with slow-braised lamb, roasted root vegetables, and a sharp horseradish crème, apparently a regional adaptation with roots in the Basque community that had settled parts of eastern Oregon generations back. It sounded unusual. It sounded specific. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing nobody would bother putting on a menu if they weren’t confident about it.

“That,” I said.

She nodded, like I’d passed something, and went back to the kitchen.

The pastie arrived golden and still steaming, the crust shattering when I cut into it, releasing a smell that made my throat close unexpectedly. The lamb was fall-apart tender. The horseradish crème had a sharpness that cut right through the richness of it. There were parsnips in there, and turnip, and something herbed that I couldn’t identify.

I put down my fork after the first bite.

Then I picked it up again, because I needed to confirm what I’d just experienced.

It was extraordinary. Not in a complicated way. In the way that perfect food is extraordinary. The kind that makes you aware of how rarely you eat something that was made with actual skill and actual care by someone who understood what they were doing. I had spent two years of my life working at the highest level of that standard, and then I had spent years after it never quite finding it anywhere I went, and I had started to wonder whether I’d built it up in my memory into something better than it had been.

I had not built it up.

This was it. This was that.

My eyes filled up.

I’m not sure how long I sat there. The coffee got refilled once, maybe twice. The woman came by at some point and just looked at me and then sat herself down across the booth, which I hadn’t invited but didn’t object to.

“That bad?” she said, nodding at the food.

I laughed; actually laughed, a surprised sound that came from somewhere real. “No. God, no. It’s... it’s incredible. It’s the best thing I’ve eaten in years.”

She accepted this with a short nod. Not modest, not falsely humble. Just receiving accurate information.

We talked after that. I don’t know how to account for the time except to say that she was the kind of person you don’t stop talking to once you’ve started, with the gift of making you feel like whatever you’re saying is the natural next thing to say. She asked what brought me to Hermiston. I told her more than I’d planned to. About the decade of wrong directions. About the moment I bought the bus ticket. About the person I was looking for.

Almost three hours had gone by when I finally said his name.

She went still.

Not the stillness of someone who doesn’t know; the stillness of someone who does.

“You know him,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

Her eyes had gone wet. Something in my stomach turned over. I had thought about this possibility before I got on the bus. I had thought about it the way you think about the thing you most cannot afford to be true.

Tell me he’s not dead. Please. Fishing in Alaska takes people. It takes them and doesn’t give them back. Tell me...

She opened her mouth to answer.

The bell above the door rang.

I didn’t turn around immediately. But she looked up, and something in her face shifted, not relief, not quite, something more complicated than that.

And then I heard him.

His voice, unmistakably his, low and certain, saying something to the people coming in behind him.

I turned in my seat just enough to see.

He was holding the door open for a woman and a small child. He let them go in first. Then he came in after them, and all three of them moved to a table by the window on the far side of the diner, and sat down together the way people sit when they know where they always sit.

The woman didn’t look my direction. Neither did the child.

Neither did Andy.

The old woman across from me hadn’t moved. She was watching me with eyes that understood exactly what I was looking at and what it meant, and she reached across the table and put her hand briefly over mine before she slid out of the booth and went to take their order.

Like she did almost every night.

Like they came in almost every night.

I turned back to my coffee and held it with both hands and did not look across the room again.