But things always changed.

When an echo comes back to you, the song is always different.

It was why the pictures disappeared from my camera back in June, and why Conner saw Henry sometimes, but other times it was like Henry didn’t even exist.

So maybe I’d never gotten back home to begin with.

From the very first time I went to Marbury, things got moved, rearranged. And once those things shifted the slightest bit, they never went back to exactly the same spots they’d come from.

That’s what I thought.

Conner elbowed me below the ribs.

That was it.

We stopped running.

I shoved him. Hard. I wanted to punch him so bad I was shaking. Both my hands tightened in fists. Of course he saw it.

“What the fuck, Con?”

He shook his head; his brow tightened up like I was speaking a different language.

“What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

“Stop fucking with me! Leave me the fuck alone!”

Conner’s tone was pleading. “What’d I do, Jack? Tell me what I did.”

I spun around, away from Conner, and threw a wild hook punch at the air. Then I put my hands on top of my head, squeezing, pulling my hair.

“What is fucking wrong with me?”

I wasn’t asking Conner. I was just sending the words out across the slate surface of the lake, skipping like stones, going nowhere but down. I didn’t even want an answer, and Conner knew it.

So we stood there like that for the longest time, absolutely silent except for the panting breaths we gulped. And I think Conner was starting to get scared too.

“I’m sorry, Con.”

He stepped toward me. I didn’t see him, but I could feel his heat as he got close. Finally, he put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight. He was sweating.

I said, “Dude. You fucking reek like BO.”

He gripped my bicep and pulled me in to him.

“It’s all okay, Jack. I’m not fucking with you. We’re here. Safe. Together. Everything is good now. Finally, dude. We made it. I swear to God, everything’s good now.”

I swallowed a lump and nodded.

“What if—”

Conner cut me off. “There is no what if, Jack. This is fucking it. I promise.”

He patted his hand on the back of my neck.

“This can be it, Jack.”

“You think?”

“It’s good enough for me, bud.”

The sky began darkening again. It would rain soon.

And Conner said, “Don’t you think this is far enough? Let’s go get drunk out of our fucking minds.”

This is it.

*   *   *

Conner didn’t say anything else about the things that were eating us inside.

He just made small talk and teased me, picked on Jack like he always did, calling me gay, testing me.

And we didn’t even clean up. Sweaty and stinking, we got dressed in the same jeans we’d worn on the train, slipped into our T-shirts and pullovers.

Conner put on his wool cap, and said, “There!” like we were racing each other out the door or something; and I just let my damp hair hang in darkened strings that went past my eyes.

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Because this was it.

And I knew what I needed to do.

I had a plan.

As soon as we shut the door behind us, I took out my phone.

Conner asked, “Nickie?”

“No. I owe someone a beer.”

We walked to The Prince of Wales.

thirty-four

By the time Henry Hewitt showed up, Conner and I were drunk.

The place was noisy and alive.

I didn’t even try to pace myself with the drinking. I wanted to poison every fear I held on to, work up the courage to finally let go of everything Jack kept balled up in the center of his fucked universe.

Conner laughed. “You know? You know what Gino fucking Genovese and Ethan call this? They say this is getting piss maggot drunk, Jack. We are piss maggoted.”

He stood up, sat, and stood again, wavering unsteadily while he carried our empty pint glasses to the bar for refills.

And that’s when Henry walked in.

Conner glanced at the door one time, but didn’t pay any attention to Henry at all. He turned back to the bartender and noisily ordered another round for us.

I waved and held three fingers up, then pointed to the man at the door.

“Make it three.”

It was almost funny to me, how after all this time when they’d both been so important in my life—in my worlds—Conner and Henry had never yet spoken to each other, sat face-to-face. And now that they were finally here together, it was almost like I could rest my case once and for all that this—whatever this was—was real.

I was the worm and I was the hole. We all were—me, Conner, Ben and Griffin, Henry, Seth, and Ethan, too. But I was the King of Marbury. Somehow I’d been chosen to go through, as Henry was chosen before me. And every time I did it, I fooled myself into thinking, This is it, but I never once got back to a place I’d been before.

I never fucking got us back home.

Maybe I was just drunk, but as I sat there in The Prince of Wales, I decided that the reason I never told anyone except Conner about what Freddie Horvath did to me was that I believed everyone else would think it was my fault.

Everything was Jack’s fault.

But this could be it.

This was good enough, and I was tired. I wished I had the balls to hold Conner and tell him how sorry I was for everything I’d done.

This is it.

Henry stood at the door, eyeing me for a moment. Then he nodded and began snaking through the crowd.

I could say he looked older, but we’d both been through so much. As he made his way toward me, I wondered if he knew about the places I’d been, if maybe he’d had dreams, and in them, if he saw London falling to pieces, ghosts who came and went, Jack bleeding to death in front of him, and blue plastic drums with the tangled bodies of lost little boys sleeping endlessly inside them.

Maybe he had no stories except for the ones that trapped us together.

I wondered if he carried a small compass with him.

I was so sick of everything. I had called Henry here to say good-bye to him one last time.

When he got to our table, I stood politely and took his hand, but I didn’t smile. Behind him, Conner balanced three pints of beer and worked at navigating a zigzagged return.

“The last time I saw you, I promised I’d buy you a beer,” I said.

Henry cleared his throat and sat beside me. “And when, exactly, was that, Jack?”

“Funny. The exactly part. The day before yesterday, I guess. We stood together on a ridge of boulders and looked out at the desert in Marbury, the night before you left for Bass-Hove. Sound familiar?”

Henry shrugged one shoulder as if to say it didn’t matter whether it sounded familiar or not. “Well, it’s always nice to have a pint with a friend, I think.”

Conner arrived, centering three nearly full glasses of beer on the table. He stood there for a while, gripping the back of his chair with both hands like he was having a hard time figuring out what changed about this picture while he was gone.

He leaned across the table and put his face so close to my ear that he almost fell on top of me. He whispered, “Hey, Jack. There’s some creepy old guy sitting next to you. Just thought I’d let you know.”

Then he laughed and sat down.

I raised my glass. “Conner Kirk, meet Henry Hewitt.”

Our beers clinked together, and Henry said, “Cheers.”

So we sat like drunken veterans trading war stories for two hours. We spoke with low voices, at times in whispers, like we were all escaped inmates from the same asylum.

Maybe we were crazy.

Each of us told of things the others hadn’t seen, but the pieces all fit together in some rhythmic alcoholic order: the Odds, the battles in Glenbrook, the floods, Anamore Fent and the Rangers, the Under, the trip into the desert, the encampment, and, finally, Henry’s loss at the settlement, which brought us all back here, to London, to The Prince of Wales.