Page 3 of Omega’s Fold

“You’d say that either way, sweetheart. Have you eaten?”

“I’ve eaten.”

She looks at me, just looks.

“I will eat,” I say eventually. “When I get home.”

“You did well in there,” she says, softer. “I know Ray put you on the spot but you needed to say your piece.”

“I know.”

She puts a hand on my arm, warm through the denim of my jacket, and then she takes it off again before I have to decide what to do about it.

“Drive safe,” she says. “Tell Caleb I said hello. Tell Matthew I’ll see him tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell them.”

She walks off toward her own car. I get in the truck and I sit for a second with both hands on the wheel, not doing anything, just breathing, before I turn the key.

The road home runs past the Linden site.

I could take the back way. I could go up over the ridge road and come out at my own gate from the north, but I don’t.

The site is lit up like a stadium. They’ve put portable floodlights on poles, and you can see from a quarter mile out. I can hear the pumps before I can see them, a low continuous thump I’ve been feeling in my molars for weeks now.

I don’t slow down or speed up. I hold the truck at a steady forty past the site, and I make myself look at it.

A mile past the site, on my own road, the floodlight glow fades out of the rear-view, and the pump noise drops off, and the dark comes back properly.

The kitchen light is on when I pull up to the house.

My brother Caleb is at the table. He has his biology textbook open and a notebook next to it with three lines of writing on the top of the page. His hair’s getting long again.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.”

I hang my jacket by the door and drop my keys in the bowl.

“Matthew in bed?”

“An hour ago. He tried to stay up for you, but I made him go to bed.”

“Okay.”

I go to the sink and run the tap and fill a glass, and the water takes a second longer to come clear than it should.

“So?” Caleb says behind me.

I turn. He’s watching me over the top of the textbook.

“So what?”

“How did it go?”

“It went.”

“Wyatt.”