Marcus didn’t answer right away. He looked down at Barnaby, who had settled back onto the blanket with a low, contented rumble, and something in his face gave way. “Almost a year now,” he finally said. “I lost the apartment last spring.” He kept his eyes on the cat instead of me, the way people do when the truth is heavy enough to look away from. I stood there in that cold parking lot, remembering the boy who had once carried a whole town’s hopes on his shoulders, and I could not reconcile him with the man in front of me.

“What happened, Marcus?” I asked. It wasn’t judgment. He heard that, I think, because he finally met my eyes. “You’ve got a few minutes?” he said. I nodded. He glanced back at the truck, at the pillow and the blankets and the little litter box, and drew a breath like a man about to set down something he’d been carrying alone for a very long time. “Everybody thinks they know how my story went after high school,” he said. “Nobody knows the real one.”