Archive of Our Own

[t-minus 0:00 — at the kitchen table]

The thing about Anthony Potero and weed brownies was that he had, historically, a very good poker face.

This was not something he'd planned. It was just a fact about himself that he'd discovered in college, the same way he'd discovered that he could function on five hours of sleep and that he was very good at talking to strangers and that he had an almost preternatural ability to remain calm during situations that were objectively spiraling. The calm wasn't detachment — he felt things, he felt things quite a lot, actually, more than he usually showed — it was more like his nervous system had developed a habit of processing loudly on the inside and quietly on the outside, which made for good content and occasionally confusing interpersonal dynamics.

He ate the brownie immediately. This was a mistake in retrospect, but it had not felt like a mistake in the moment because in the moment it had felt like the correct power move, which it was, narratively, but which also meant that by the time he told the group that one of the brownies was a weed brownie and he'd already eaten his, the substance in question had already been introduced into his system with the cheerful irreversibility of a decision you couldn't un-make.

He had two hours, he told them. Two hours at the 2026 HVAC Installer Convention.

"WAIT, NO WAY," Will said.

"OH MY GOD," Hanbon said, and her face did the thing where she was already filing the moment away, which he recognized because he'd known her long enough to recognize most of her faces, and this particular one meant she found this extremely funny but had decided not to be the loudest about it.

Coy said: "I'm scared."

And Anthony had looked at him — Coy in the kitchen, Coy with a slightly anxious set to his jaw and his hand already pulling at his sleeve, the morning light doing something to his expression that made him look approximately twelve years old and also somehow completely fine — and had thought, with the specific clarity of a person whose brownie had not yet kicked in: you're going to be so funny at this convention.

He had not said this out loud. He was going to tuck it away and let the video reveal it.

This was, Anthony reflected later, when he was considerably less able to tuck things away, probably the last coherent plan he made that morning.

[t-minus 0:43 — the car]

The brownie kicked in somewhere on the Garden State Parkway.

This was not dramatic. It was not a sudden shift. It was more like the volume on the world going up by about fifteen percent — colors a little more saturated, sounds a little more present, the texture of the car seat under his hands more specifically itself than it usually was. He was aware of this happening in the abstract way that you were aware of things when you'd eaten an edible before and knew the shape of the experience.

He was also aware, in the same abstract way, that he was going to need to be extremely careful at the HVAC convention.

Will was saying something in the front seat. Anthony heard the shape of it without quite catching the words. Outside, New Jersey went past in its flat, grey, familiar way — the particular visual texture of a place he'd grown up near and moved back to and spent a significant portion of his adult life driving through, which he genuinely did not mind, which he sometimes found surprising about himself.

He looked at Coy.

Coy was sitting next to him. This was a spatial fact that Anthony registered with slightly more attention than it warranted. Coy was looking out his window with the expression he wore when he was thinking something he hadn't decided to share yet, which was a specific expression Anthony had catalogued — one of approximately forty Coy expressions he'd catalogued over the past year, not intentionally, just in the way that you catalogued things about people you spent a lot of time with and paid a lot of attention to.

The word catalogued was starting to seem like a strange word. He turned it over. Catalogued. Like a museum. Like Coy was a collection of things being preserved.

Okay. The brownie was kicking in.

"Anthony, you're being really quiet," Hanbon said, from the front seat.

"Oh," Anthony said. "Wait. That's a— I'm going to use that one."

He wasn't sure what he meant by that. But it felt true.

[t-minus 1:02 — outside the convention center]

Business professional, he had told them. Or business casual. Or just look nice.

He was wearing his regular clothes. This was fine. He was fine.

The convention center was large and fluorescent-lit and full of people who knew a great deal about HVAC systems, which Anthony currently did not, which was fine, because none of them knew that either, which meant the social contract of professional events — you perform confidence, they perform confidence, everyone leaves having confirmed that they are real — could proceed normally.

He had a plan. He had several plans. He'd written them on the whiteboard, which Will had transcribed in handwriting that was, somehow, illegible despite containing only twelve words. The plans were: find who ate the weed brownie. Network. Survive two hours. Make the bit work.

These were good plans.

He stood outside the convention center in the thin January light and looked at his group — Will in his work vest, which was somehow exactly right, Hanbon already holding a press badge with the calm of someone who had obtained it through means nobody had thought to question, Coy in a tie and a backpack of genuinely alarming proportions, turning slightly so the full architectural scale of the backpack became visible in profile — everyone nearby looked, briefly — and Coy reading his own name tag with an expression that suggested he was encountering the phrase energy engineer for the first time and finding it deeply suspicious

Something warm and slightly overwhelming that usually lived in the background.

Pride, he identified, after a moment. Or something adjacent to pride. The specific feeling of standing next to people you'd made something with and knowing the thing you'd made was real.

"Energy engineer Coy energy engineer," Coy said, to his name tag, and looked up at Anthony. "I'm scared."

"You already said that," Anthony said.

"It's still true."

"It'll be fine," Anthony said. "You're an energy engineer. You know about energy."

"I know nothing about energy."

"Neither does anyone here, probably."

"Anthony, these are HVAC professionals."

"Right, and they know about HVAC. That's different from energy."

Coy considered this with more seriousness than it deserved, which was something he did — gave serious consideration to things that didn't require it and quick dismissal to things that seemed important, which was a quality Anthony found baffling and fascinating in approximately equal measure.

"Okay," Coy said.

"Okay," Anthony agreed.

He looked at the name tag again. Energy modeler. He'd picked that one for Coy specifically. He hadn't examined why.

He examined it now, briefly, and then stopped examining it because the brownie was making everything feel slightly too significant and he didn't trust his interpretations.

[t-minus 1:18 — inside, main floor]

The convention was enormous.

This was not something Anthony had accounted for, which was on him. He'd imagined something smaller — a hotel ballroom, maybe, with booths and name tags and the particular ambient hum of people discussing things he didn't understand. What the HVAC Installer Convention actually was: a vast exhibition hall the size of several airports stacked on each other, full of industrial equipment that Anthony suspected cost more than the house he'd grown up in, lit by fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency he could feel in his back teeth.

It was, objectively, a lot.

He walked through it with the careful deliberateness of someone navigating unfamiliar terrain, which was good, actually, because he was a YouTuber and this was content and content required presence of mind, which he had, currently, in about seventy percent of normal capacity. Thirty percent had gone somewhere else. He suspected he knew where.

"Anthony, you okay?" Will said, appearing at his elbow.

"I'm great," Anthony said. "I'm networking."

"You're smiling at a piece of industrial ductwork."

"It's impressive ductwork."

Will looked at him, then at the ductwork, then back at him. "Okay," he said, with the particular tone he used when he'd decided to let something go for now but was filing it for later.

Anthony kept walking. The convention floor was full of sounds — the ambient hum of HVAC equipment doing its thing, the murmur of professionals discussing things professionally, somewhere in the distance what he was almost certain was a juggler. He moved through it all with the slight unreality of a person who was high at the 2026 HVAC Installer Convention, which was a sentence he was going to think about later.

He passed a booth demonstrating something to do with air circulation and watched the demonstration without retaining any of it, and then he saw Coy across the floor.

Coy was talking to someone. An industry professional, apparently — a man in a hard hat who was speaking with the animation of a person who had a great deal of opinions about doors, specifically, which Anthony could tell from a distance because the man kept pointing at a door display with increasing emphasis. Coy was listening. He was doing the full-attention listening, the kind where his whole body oriented toward the speaker, and his expression was completely composed, and you would not know — you could not know, from looking at him — that he was (a) completely unqualified to be at this convention, (b) mildly anxious as a baseline, (c) potentially also high on a weed brownie.

He looked, in other words, like he belonged there.

Anthony watched him for longer than he'd intended to.

The door man said something and Coy nodded, slowly, with the air of someone processing highly significant information, and then he said something back — Anthony couldn't hear it from here — and the door man laughed. Actually laughed. Coy had made an HVAC professional laugh in a conversation he had no business being part of, at a convention he had no business attending, while potentially high.

The warm-and-slightly-overwhelming feeling came back.

Anthony looked away.

He pulled out his phone and made some notes for the video.

[t-minus 1:31 — near the vending area]

The brownie situation was, at this point, definitely happening.

Anthony was aware of this in the way you were aware of weather — not alarming, just present, a condition of the environment. He felt good, actually. He felt very specifically good, which was the thing about edibles that he sometimes forgot and then remembered: not sloppy, not lost, just... turned up. Like the dial on everything had been nudged slightly clockwise.

He found Hanbon near a food vendor looking at something on her phone.

"Han," he said.

She looked up. She had the Irish scone. He didn't know where she'd gotten the Irish scone. At the 2026 HVAC Installer Convention, in January, in the Javits Center, Hanbon had obtained an Irish scone from an unknown source, and she was eating it with the calm of a person for whom this was not remarkable.

"How are you feeling," she said. Not a question. An assessment.

"Great," he said. "I'm great. Have I said anything weird?"

"You told Will the ductwork was impressive."

"It is impressive."

"Anthony."

"Hanbon."

She looked at him for a moment with the expression she used for editing decisions — deliberate, without judgment, taking stock. He'd been on the receiving end of this expression for several years and he still found it slightly uncanny, the feeling of being watched that carefully.

"How long have you known," he said.

"About the brownie?" She broke off a piece of the scone. "Since approximately three bites in."

"And you didn't say anything."

"You didn't say anything either."

This was fair. He'd eaten the brownie and announced that it was a weed brownie with the energy of a person revealing a plot twist, which was the energy it was supposed to have, because this was a video. He'd made a choice.

"Coy rinsed his mouth out," Hanbon said, conversationally.

"After eating the brownie?"

"He said it was so he wouldn't have brown teeth for the next shot."

Anthony thought about this. "That's... very him."

"It is very him," Hanbon agreed. She ate more scone. "He's been talking to an HVAC professional for twenty minutes."

"I know. I saw."

"You were watching him for a while."

"I was watching the content," Anthony said. "I'm working."

Hanbon looked at him. The editing look again, except softer, with something underneath it that he recognized but chose not to name right now.

"Sure," she said.

"I'm working, Han."

"I know." She gave him a piece of the scone. "Go drink some water."

He took the scone. "Where did you even get this?"

"I have my methods."

"You're terrifying."

"You've said that."

He ate the scone. It was good. He stood next to Hanbon in the middle of the HVAC Installer Convention eating a piece of Irish scone that she'd acquired through unknown means, and he thought about the editing look, and what was underneath it, and about Coy talking to a man about doors for twenty minutes and making him laugh.

"Han," he said.

"Yeah."

"Nothing," he said. "Never mind."

She looked at him one more time with the expression that meant she already knew what he'd been about to say and had decided to let him not say it.

"Okay," she said.

He went to find some water.

[t-minus 1:44 — somewhere near the industrial refrigeration display]

The thing about Anthony Potero — and this was something he knew about himself, had known for a while, had articulated to a journalist once in a way he'd immediately felt slightly exposed by — was that he spent a lot of time making things.

Not making as in producing. Making as in: the sustained attention to building something that didn't exist until you built it, and the specific quality of aliveness that came from that, and the way that aliveness was different from the aliveness of everything else. He'd been chasing that feeling since he was twelve years old filming himself on an iPod. He'd gotten better at it. He'd gotten worse at other things in proportion — worse at sitting still, at being unoccupied, at existing in spaces that weren't in the middle of becoming something.

He thought about this a lot. He thought about it currently, standing next to an industrial refrigeration display at the Javits Center while mildly high, which was perhaps not the ideal setting for self-reflection but which was, apparently, what was happening.

He was good at making things. He was still learning how to be still.

He had been still, in the car this morning, sitting next to Coy on the Garden State Parkway. He'd been still enough to notice things — the expression Coy wore looking out the window, the quality of the light through the glass, the specific sound Coy made when he was thinking, a small exhale, barely there. He'd been still and he'd noticed all of this and filed it under the category he'd been filling for a year, the category that didn't have a label because he hadn't needed to label it, he'd just been adding to it.

He was adding to it now, across the convention floor, without meaning to.

Coy had found Will. They were standing near a booth with matching expressions of mild bewilderment, which was a combination Anthony found, currently, extremely distracting. Will was doing the thing he did in public situations — performing a confidence he didn't quite have, all wide gestures and slightly-too-loud voice — and Coy was doing the thing he did in those same situations, which was the opposite: performing a calm he didn't quite have, contained and careful, precise. They were running the same operating system in different modes.

Anthony watched them and thought about the interview. The journalist asking what motivated him. Him saying it's really fun. it's creative. it's really funny. and it's with friends. it's like everything I wanted my college videos to be.

He'd meant that. He'd been speaking to a camera and he'd meant it.

He was thinking about it now in the context of Coy specifically, which was new, or — not new, exactly. Just new in this form. New as a thought he was having consciously rather than a fact he was moving around without examining.

Something about Coy had always made the work feel more like what he'd wanted it to be.

He turned this over.

The brownie made him feel like he was turning things over very carefully, with both hands, in good light.

[t-minus 1:52 — the business call]

His phone rang.

He looked at it. A contact name he recognized, a deal they'd been discussing — a brand thing through Pufferfish, one of the ongoing projects, the kind of call he took in the middle of videos sometimes because the work didn't stop because you were at the HVAC convention.

He answered it.

"Hey," he said. "Yeah, no, I can talk."

He was aware, peripherally, that Hanbon had found him and was filming. This was fine. This was content. He kept his voice professional, which was easy — he'd been taking professional calls since his early twenties, had developed the ability to switch registers as needed, content-Anthony and work-Anthony and phone-Anthony all running simultaneously on whatever bandwidth he had available.

"Right, so the energy use in the building in the winter," he said. "Yeah. Yeah, we were able to knock it off to seven-year payback."

Will said something nearby. He didn't catch it.

"Mm," he said into the phone. "Uh-huh."

"He's floppy," he heard Will say. "He's flopping."

Anthony continued the call. He was not floppy. He was a professional.

"He never laughs on business calls," Hanbon said somewhere. "That's professional."

He finished the call. He put his phone in his pocket.

He looked up.

Coy was standing about six feet away, watching him with an expression Anthony hadn't catalogued before — or hadn't noticed himself cataloguing, which was different. Something attentive and slightly soft, like he'd been watching the call with the same attention he gave things he found interesting.

"Business," Anthony said.

"I know," Coy said.

"I'm not high on that call."

"You seemed fine."

"I am fine."

Coy looked at him for another moment. "Your eyes are tired," he said. Just an observation. The way he said most things — not commentary, not critique, just: here is a thing I noticed.

Anthony had gotten that comment his whole life. Your eyes look tired. Had gotten it in the comments, in interviews, from strangers on trains. He'd made peace with his eyes. They were tired. They'd been tired since approximately 2019. He didn't know what to do about them.

"I know," he said.

"It's not a bad thing," Coy said. "They just look like they've been paying attention for a long time."

Anthony opened his mouth. Closed it.

"That's," he said. "That's a—" He stopped.

"What?"

"That's a really nice way to put it," Anthony said. "That was a nice thing to say."

Coy blinked, like he'd expected a different response. "Okay."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." A pause. "Are you definitely okay?"

"The brownie's fine. I'm— I'm good. I'm present."

"You seem like you're very present."

"I am very present," Anthony confirmed.

Coy looked at him for another moment with the soft-attentive expression that Anthony had not finished cataloguing. Then he nodded, once, and turned back toward the convention floor.

"Come on," he said. "Will found a juggler."

Anthony followed him.

He was very present. He was, if anything, more present than usual. Everything was clear and specific and immediate, the fluorescent lights and the industrial sounds and the warmth of the convention crowd and Coy walking slightly ahead of him with the energy engineer badge swinging from his lanyard, and the feeling Anthony had been turning over — the warm-and-slightly-overwhelming one — was sitting right in the middle of his chest, visible and named, waiting to see what he was going to do with it.

He kept walking.

He filed it.

He'd figure out what to do with it later.

[t-minus 1:58 — the LED room]

They found it by accident.

Will had been leading them somewhere — toward the juggler, Anthony thought, or toward the exit, or toward some other goal that Will had committed to and then lost track of in the way Will sometimes did, moving through spaces with the confidence of a person who was certain he had a destination — and they'd passed through a doorway and suddenly the convention wasn't fluorescent anymore.

The room was dark and full of LED panels. Not decorative, not intentional — just product displays, industrial lighting systems arranged for demonstration, the kind of thing that existed because someone had to set them up and this was where they'd set them up. But the effect was something else entirely: columns of light in blue and green and a gold that was almost the right color, shifting slowly, and the four of them had come through the door and stopped.

Anthony stopped.

He stood in the LED room at the 2026 HVAC Installer Convention and looked at the light.

The brownie, at this point, was doing exactly what brownies did with light — making it more specifically itself, making the colors more precisely their colors, making the shift from one to the next feel like something you could track if you paid attention. He paid attention. The light moved.

"This is so cool, bro," Hanbon said, quietly, from somewhere to his left. "We should just hang out in here."

Will said something. Anthony didn't catch it.

He looked at the light.

He looked at Coy.

Coy was standing a few feet to his right, face tilted slightly upward, watching the light move with an expression Anthony recognized because it was rare and he'd catalogued it specifically. It was the expression Coy wore when he wasn't watching himself. When the camera was off — or when he forgot the camera was on, which was different, rarer — and there was no audience and no performance and nothing to calibrate against. Just a person in a room, looking at something that was beautiful, and being moved by it without apology.

He looked like the field, Anthony thought, suddenly. The one he'd described — the Illinois field at dusk, the one minute when everything went gold. He'd heard Coy describe it in the restaurant and filed the image. He was looking at it now.

He was aware that this was the brownie making everything feel significant.

He was also aware that this was not entirely the brownie.

He'd heard Coy talk about the theater thing and thought: of course. He'd watched Coy learn the house, slowly, over five months — the floorboard patterns and the kitchen habits and the quality of the light at different hours — and felt something each time, the slow accumulation of another person becoming present in a space. He'd watched Coy's streams in October, six songs from Rent over four Fridays, and thought of course again, in the same register.

He saw himself in Coy, a little. He'd said this out loud, once, and meant it — the same restlessness, the same compulsion toward making things, the same underlying anxiety that manifested differently. But there was something else, too, something that didn't fit the younger version of myself framing, something that was more like: you are the specific shape of person that makes everything feel more like what I wanted it to be.

He'd been not-quite-naming this for a year.

He named it now, standing in the LED room with the light moving over everything in gold and green and blue, with the brownie making his thoughts slower and more careful, with Hanbon to his left quietly watching all of them.

He named it and it sat in his chest with the weight of something that had been there for a while and had just been given its word.

He was not going to do anything with it right now. He was high at the HVAC convention. That was not the right context.

But he named it, and he held it, and he looked at Coy in the shifting light and felt the warm-and-slightly-overwhelming thing as exactly what it was.

[t-minus 2:00]

They gathered in a corner of the main floor, out of the stream of foot traffic, for the vote.

"On three," Anthony said. "If you have the weed brownie, raise your hand."

He looked at their faces. Will, who had been dancing slightly-too-loose since approximately the first hour. Hanbon, who had been serene and amused since the kitchen. Coy, who had talked to a man about doors for twenty minutes and made him laugh and walked through an LED room like he was seeing gold.

"Ready? One, two, three."

All four hands went up.

The eruption that followed was immediate and chaotic and exactly right. Will was saying something about hiding it. Hanbon — of course — had known from the start and said nothing, watching them all run in circles. Anthony found this incredibly funny. He found everything incredibly funny. He was standing in the middle of his group at an HVAC convention with all four of them holding their hands up like children being called on simultaneously, and he was laughing, and the laugh started in his chest and climbed, the real one, the one he couldn't perform.

"I was tweaking out trying to hide it from you guys," Coy said.

"Why did you rinse your mouth out," Hanbon said.

"For the shot—"

"He rinsed his mouth out," Will told Anthony, very seriously, "so he wouldn't have brown teeth."

"I know," Anthony said, still laughing. "I know, that's so—"

"That's so him," Hanbon said.

"That's so him," Anthony agreed.

Coy was doing the expression — the one where he was trying not to smile and losing badly — and he looked at Anthony and for a second they were just looking at each other in the middle of the HVAC convention with all four of their hands still loosely in the air, and Anthony felt the thing he'd named in the LED room, warm and present and not going anywhere.

"I feel so much better," Will was saying. "Oh my god, this whole time—"

"You were dancing," Hanbon told him.

"I dance normally—"

"Will, you were dancing like you were high."

"That's just my dancing—"

Anthony looked away from Coy. He looked at his group — Will insisting his dancing was normal, Hanbon quietly destroying this argument with evidence, Coy with his hand over his mouth trying not to laugh at both of them — and the warm-and-slightly-overwhelming feeling expanded to include all of them, the specific texture of this, the specific people.

He thought about what he'd told the journalist. It's like everything I wanted my college videos to be.

He thought about Hanbon, the only one who'd gotten it in those years. Me and her couldn't do it alone.

He thought about Will showing up with a vest and bad whiteboard handwriting and a defensive love for his own blender, and about Hanbon getting an Irish scone from unknown sources, and about Coy at an HVAC convention in an energy modeler badge making a stranger laugh about doors.

He thought about what it meant to finally have the thing you'd been building toward and to be standing inside it.

He thought about the LED room. The light moving. The specific shape of a person being moved without apology.

He had two hours of HVAC convention footage to edit later. He was going to need to think very carefully about what to keep.

But right now he was here, and everyone's hands were still up, and Hanbon was saying something to Will that was making Will look betrayed in a new way, and Coy was laughing — actually laughing, the real one — and Anthony stood in the middle of all of it and let himself be very present.

The brownie helped. It was not just the brownie.

[later — the group chat, 11:47pm]

bof (no berto)

anthpo: okay so I have thoughts about the edit

hanbon: it's almost midnight

anthpo: I know but I have thoughts

wahony: same time as always

hanbon: what are your thoughts

anthpo: I think we lead with the reveal. like cold open — hands go up, we cut to thirty minutes earlier, work backward. it earns the twist more.

hanbon: I was thinking the same thing actually

anthpo: great minds

hanbon: I'll start a rough cut tomorrow

wahony: can I be in the thumbnail

hanbon: no

wahony: why

hanbon: you look too normal in all the good stills

wahony: that's a compliment

hanbon: it is not

anthpo: what about the LED room

A longer pause than the others. Anthony watched the screen.

hanbon: what about it

anthpo: do we use it

hanbon: define use it

anthpo: there's like two minutes of footage in there. it's not really video material. it's just. I don't know.

Another pause.

hanbon: I'll look at the footage

hanbon: and I'll make a decision

anthpo: okay

anthpo: trust the editor

hanbon: always

wahony: wait what happened in the LED room I was looking at the fridge

hanbon: nothing Will

wahony: okay

Anthony locked his phone. He lay on his bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling, which had no water stain, and thought about the LED room.

He thought about what Hanbon had said, weeks ago now but fresh in some way: I leave in what's true. That's the job.

He thought about what it would look like. The footage. Whether the camera had caught anything that should be kept or anything that should be cut or anything that existed in the specific category of things that were true but not yet ready to be seen.

He didn't know.

He trusted the editor.

He closed his eyes.

He thought about the field in Illinois. The light going gold. Someone texting the field is doing the thing and what it would mean to be the person who got that text and what it would mean to answer it without overthinking.

He thought about tired eyes. About paying attention for a long time.

He thought: later.

He thought: soon.

He thought: you are the specific shape of person that makes everything feel more like what I wanted it to be, and he held it in the dark, and the brownie had worn off by now, and the feeling was still there.

It had not been just the brownie.

It had not been just the brownie for a while.

[two weeks later — the group chat, 10:14pm]

pisolive: hey are you awake

anthpo: obviously. why are you awake.

pisolive: couldn't sleep. brain's loud.

anthpo: go drink some water and look at something that isn't a screen

pisolive: this IS a screen

anthpo: you know what I mean

A pause.

pisolive: han

pisolive: are you happy

hanbon: yeah. are you?

pisolive: getting there

Anthony read this exchange at 10:17pm from the kitchen, where he'd been getting water for the precise reason Hanbon had told Coy to get water, because apparently both of them had developed the same advice in response to the same person.

He stood at the counter and looked at his phone and thought about getting there and what it meant and where there was.

He put the phone down.

He thought about going upstairs.

He thought about the kitchen at 1am and the way the space arranged itself, the right number of things.

He picked the phone back up.

anthpo: hey

anthpo: are you in the kitchen

A pause. Longer than the others.

pisolive: no I'm in my room

pisolive: why

anthpo: no reason. I'm getting water. go to sleep.

pisolive: you go to sleep

anthpo: I will

pisolive: okay

anthpo: okay

He put the phone down.

He looked at the ceiling of the kitchen, which had a water stain in the corner that Coy had told him looked like a sitting duck, which he'd disagreed with — it was clearly a boot — and they'd been having this argument for two months and neither of them had moved on it.

He looked at the boot-shaped water stain.

He thought: later.

He thought: soon.

He drank his water and went upstairs and did not stop at Coy's door, which was slightly ajar, which it always was, which he'd noticed without ever saying anything about it.

He got into bed.

He looked at the ceiling.

He thought about the field.

He thought: soon.

Because, perhaps, some things only make sense once you know what the wheel lands on.