Aly looked frightened. She’d seen him through the worst of times, and he knew that she was terrified of him sliding back into depression. “But you love hockey and you’re good at it.”

“The season ends in two weeks. And I start college in September.”

“Leni.”

Matthew wasn’t surprised that she understood. He and Aly had talked about everything, including Leni and how much her letters meant to Matthew. “What if she goes off to college somewhere? I want to see her. I might not get another chance.”

“Are you sure you’re ready? Everywhere you look, you’ll see Mom.”

And there it was. The big question. The truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle any of it—going back to Kaneq, seeing the river that swallowed his mother, seeing his father’s grief in Technicolor, up close—but he knew one thing. Leni’s letters had mattered to him. Maybe they’d saved him as much as Aly had. For all their separate miles, and their different lives, Leni’s letters and the photographs she sent reminded him of who he’d been.

“I see her everywhere here. Don’t you?”

Aly nodded slowly. “I swear I see her out of the corner of my eye all of the time. I talk to her at night.”

He nodded. Sometimes in the morning when he woke up, he had a split second where he thought the world was upright, that he was an ordinary kid in an ordinary house and that his mom would soon be calling him down for breakfast. The silence on mornings like that was awful.

“You want me to come with you?”

He did. He wanted her beside him, holding his hand, keeping him steady. “No. You don’t get out of school until June,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness in his voice, knowing she heard it, too. “Besides, I think I have to do this by myself.”

“You know Dad loves you. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.”

He did know that. He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own. He and Dad had had a tough time talking in the past few years. Grief and guilt had bent them out of shape.

Aly reached out for him, took his hand in hers.

He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t say anything. They both knew why: there was nothing to say. Sometimes you had to go backward in order to go forward. This truth they knew, even as young as they were. But there was another truth, one they shied away from, one they tried to protect each other from. Sometimes it was painful to go back.

Maybe grief had been waiting for Matthew to return all this time, waiting, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe in Kaneq he’d undo all this progress and break down again.

“You’re stronger now,” Aly said.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

* * *

TWO WEEKS LATER, Matthew flew his uncle’s float plane over Otter Point and banked right, lowered, touched down on the flat blue water below. He killed the engine and floated toward the big silvered-wood arch that read WALKER COVE.

His father stood at the end of the dock, his arms at his sides.

Matthew jumped off the pontoon and onto the dock and tied the float plane down. He remained that way, bent over, his back to his father, for a moment longer than necessary, gathering the strength he needed to really be here.

At last he straightened, turned.

His father was close now; he pulled Matthew into a bone-jarring hug that went on so long Matthew had to gasp for breath. Dad drew back finally, looked at him, and love took shape in the air around them, a regret- and memory-filled version, maybe, sad around the edges, but love.

It had been only a few months since they’d seen each other. (Dad made it a point to come to several of Matthew’s hockey games and visit in Fairbanks as often as the harsh weather and homesteading chores allowed, but they had never really talked about anything that mattered.)

Dad seemed older, his skin more lined and creased. He smiled in that way of his, the way he did everything in life, full tilt, no explanations, no regrets, no safety nets. You knew Tom Walker in a glance, because he let you in. You knew instantly that this was a man who always told the truth as he saw it, whether it was popular or not, who had a set of rules to guide his life and no other rules mattered. He laughed harder than any man Matthew had ever met, and Matthew had only seen him cry once. On that day out on the ice.

“You’re even taller than the last time I saw you.”

“I’m like the Hulk. I keep tearing through my clothes.”

Dad grabbed Matthew’s suitcase and led him up the dock, past the fishing boat straining at its lines; seabirds cawed overhead, waves slapped the pilings. The smell of kelp baking in the sun and eelgrass beaten down by waves greeted him.

At the top of the stairs, Matthew got his first glimpse of the big log home with the soaring bowed front and wraparound deck. A welcoming light illuminated the pots hanging from the eaves, still full of last year’s dead geraniums.

Mom’s pots.

He paused, caught his breath.

He hadn’t realized how time could unspool the years of your life until for a second you were fourteen again, crying from a place so deep it seemed to predate you, desperate to be whole again.

Dad went on ahead.

Matthew forced himself to move. He passed by the weather-grayed picnic table and climbed the wooden steps to the purple-painted front door. Beside it hung a metal cutout of an orca that read WHALECOME! (That had been a gift from Matthew; it always cracked his mother up.)

It brought tears to his eyes. He wiped them away, embarrassed by the display in front of his stoic father, and went inside.

The house looked the same as it always had. A cluster of reclaimed and antique furniture in the living room, an old picnic table draped in bright yellow fabric with a vase of blue flowers placed in its center. A collection of candles stood like a medieval village around the flowers. His mother’s touch was everywhere. He could almost hear her.

The interior of the house, bark-darkened log walls, windows large enough to capture the view, a pair of brown leather couches, a piano Grandma had had shipped in from the Outside. He walked over to the window, stared out, saw the cove and the dock through a watery image of his own face.

He felt his father come up behind him. “Welcome home.”

Home. The word had layers of meaning. A place. An emotion. Memories. “She was out ahead of me,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness of his voice.

He heard the way his father drew in a sharp breath. Would he stop Matthew, abort this conversation they’d never dared to have?