For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the steady rhythm of the monitor beside his bed.
Then he whispered, “I don’t know.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“I’ve spent thirty-nine years trying to find out.”
That wasn’t the answer I had expected.
I sank back into the chair.
Lucas pulled another chair closer, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Douglas.
He looked exhausted. Older than sixty somehow, though we were the same age. Illness had hollowed his cheeks and thinned his hands, but his eyes were still the same.
Those eyes had followed me down school hallways.
Those eyes had watched me steal French fries from his plate.
Those eyes had looked at me beneath the football bleachers when we were nineteen and promised that if the rest of life failed us, we would find each other again.
And now those same eyes were filled with something I had never seen in them before.
