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"I miss you too," I say.

His whole face lights up. Somebody calls his name from another room.

"I have to go," he says. "My uncle's doing a toast. It's going to be forty minutes long. Pray for me."

"Go."

He hangs up. I sit there in the dark with the phone in my hand and the fire going and I miss him so much it's like a pulled muscle, a deep ache I can't stretch out.

On the twenty-sixth, at nine at night, headlights come up the driveway.

I'm on the couch. I get up and go to the window, and there's a small blue rental car stopped behind my truck, with its wipers going and snow piling up on the roof. The driver's door opens. Somebody gets out in a big puffy coat, holding a duffel bag over his head against the snow, and starts running for the porch, slipping on every other step.

I open the door before he can knock.

"Hi," he says. He's covered in snow. His cheeks are red. He's grinning.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came back early." He stamps his feet on the mat. "I flew into O'Hare and rented a car. Do you know how far this is? It's so far. There's nothing up here. I saw a deer. It looked at me like I was lost."

"You were lost."

"I was a little lost." He pushes past me into the house, drops his bag on the floor, and starts pulling off his coat. "The GPS sent me down a road that was just a field. I had to back out. For a mile."

"Rémy."

He stops with one arm out of his coat.

"What did you tell your parents?"

He doesn't look at me. "That there was a team thing. Optional skate. Moretti wants the young guys back early."

"You lied to your mother."

"I'm getting very good at it," he says, lightly. It doesn't sound light.

He gets the coat the rest of the way off and hangs it on the hook by the door, the one where Laurel used to hang hers, and then he turns around and looks at the room. The fire. The couch. The big dark windows with the lake behind them.

"There are no curtains," he says.

"There's nobody out there. The nearest house is two miles away. It's empty in winter."

"So nobody can see in."

"Nobody."

"We don't have to take the stairs up two floors." He's turning in a slow circle, taking it all in. "We don't have to park on different levels. Nobody's going to knock on the door with pizza."

"Nobody," I say again.

He stops turning. He looks at me.

"Then come here," he says.

I go.

Later, in front of the fire, I tell him about Danny.