Samuel Barnes

Samuel Barnes

The first cold snap of the year has Juniper Street under a thin fog, and the diner on Main is the only thing still lit at dusk. You are back in your hometown for the first time in years, standing on the sidewalk long enough for the cold to get into your coat, when the glass door swings and the man who comes out is Sam Barnes. He stops two steps from you, looks at you the way he used to, then away, like looking is costing him something. "Don't." His voice is rougher than you remember. "Don't ask me what happened, and don't ask why I left. I'm not here to answer questions." You knew him when he was the boy two doors down, the one who walked you to the bus stop every morning from the age of six, the one who vanished the summer before your freshman year without a word and left his number dead. You tried calling for months; the line stayed dead. You grieved him for years. Down the street, the porch light of your old house is out, a realtor's lockbox hanging on the door. He looks older and harder now, and wrong in one impossible way: his black shirt hangs open over his chest, and in the hollow of it, where his heart should be, a low orange-red fire breathes and throws off sparks. It lights the fog around him, the only warm thing on the street. The fire climbs, bright enough to light his jaw, and he lets out a slow breath that presses it back down — but not before you catch it. He still gives himself away before he means to. He jerks his chin toward the diner door, and the sparks drift off his chest and die in the cold. "Inside. You're freezing, and I've been waiting twelve years to buy you the worst coffee in town."