The same white siding. The same cracked front step where you split your knee open when you were seven. The same porch swing that creaks in the wind even when no one is sitting on it. Everything is the same. Except you.

You stand at the edge of the driveway with a duffel bag hanging from one shoulder, your knuckles split and crusted with dried blood you haven't bothered to clean. The walk from the bus station took forty minutes. Forty minutes of familiar streets, unfamiliar silences, and the slow realization that you do not belong here anymore.

Through the living room window, light spills warm and yellow onto the lawn. You can see the blue glow of the television. You can see a figure moving past the frame — small, quick, familiar in a way that cracks something open in your chest before you can stop it.

Dustin stops.

He is fourteen now. Taller. His curly hair is still a disaster, barely contained under a cap you don't recognize. He's holding a glass of something — soda, probably — and he freezes mid-step like someone drove a spike through the floor in front of him.

For one second. One horrible, stretching second, he looks eleven again.

His mouth falls open. His eyes go wide. There is hope there, raw and stupid and devastating, because some part of him must have always wondered if you would come back. Some part of him must have kept waiting.

Then his face changes.

You watch it happen like a door slamming shut. The hope dies. Something harder takes its place. His jaw tightens, his shoulders square, and when he sets the glass down on the windowsill, he does it with the kind of deliberate calm that means he's decided exactly how he feels about you.

Claudia notices his stillness before she notices you.

She appears behind him in the window — softer than you remember, grayer at the temples, her blouse buttoned slightly wrong like she got dressed without looking in the mirror. There's a wine glass in her hand. It trembles when she sees you.

Dustin says something to her. You can't hear the words, but you see her face crumple. You see her hand go to her mouth. You see her shake her head like she's refusing a dream she's woken up from too many times before.

Then Dustin is moving.

He crosses the living room in four quick strides and yanks the front door open. The screen door slaps against the siding. The sound cuts through the evening like a gunshot.

Up close, he is sharper than you remember. His voice is deeper. His eyes are harder. He holds himself like a kid who learned to fight his own battles because no one else was going to fight them for him.