The shoe on the dashboard belonged to a kid who was eleven now and would be mortified to know it was still there. Neither of us reached to move it. Moving it meant one of us had decided something.
The engine ticked. My breath fogged his half of the windshield.
"You should get in before your feet freeze," he said. On my phone the words came up underneath, the way they had for a year: *Don't go yet.* I'd stopped noticing the gap between what Sam's mouth did and what the overlay said he meant. Or I'd told myself I'd stopped.
"I'm fine," he said. *I miss you.*
"You're always fine."
He turned his wrist up on his knee, thumb finding the old fryer burn — that smooth raised worm of scar. A thing he does when he's not saying something. I took his wrist before I decided to. Read the ridge of it in the dark, my cold-red fingers on skin that stayed warm no matter the season.
"Katie."
*Please.*
I put my mouth on his to stop the translation. It started like an argument — teeth and no grace, his hand shoving into my open coat, mine under the wool at his soft middle — and the windows went white around us and I thought: he still. He still. He does.
I pulled back with my forehead on his jaw, both of us breathing hard, wanting held and not spent.
"You never say it," I said.
"Say what."
I almost laughed. A year of carrying his secret for him and he's going to make me name it too.
I didn't answer. I'm the one who turned the overlay on, a year ago, both our phones, so I'd finally know. I've known since spring.
He's been screaming it into the silence between every word.
I put my hand back inside his coat. The kid's shoe sat there on the dash, one lace undone, going nowhere. We were the same, the three of us — the shoe, him, me — waiting for someone to finally pick us up and carry us inside.
