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    “He said to me, ‘And I don’t love him. We’re just friends.’  
    “And then I said, ‘Then you’re as dumb as I am, ‘cause you ain’t lying to no one but yourself. You just scared of loving him back is all.’ And I walked off home.” Robbie laughed. “Think I could’ve scraped half the dirt from the road with his jaw hanging down the way it was.  
    “Didn’t see him for about a week or so, then he finally stopped by with this new depot I’d been wanting and asked me to help him with it. He wouldn’t even get out of the truck. I had to walk over. But he didn’t want to talk about the depot, even I knew that.  
    “I asked him, I said, ‘Dusty, why you bothering yourself over such a small word as love? I don’t care who you love.’ I was resting my arms on his window by then and all he did was jerk his head for me to get in the truck.  
    “Pa was out working in the kennel, so I don’t know why he was so embarrassed about talking about it. He didn’t say nothing for the longest, we just drove and drove.  
    “Finally he said, ‘It ain’t right.’  
    “I asked him, ‘Who says?’  
    “‘Most folks,’ is what he told me. ‘Church goers.’ And I asked him, ‘You mean the same church goers don’t want me singing the praises of Jesus too loud?’  
    “He kind of smiled at that and said, ‘Them’s the ones.’  
    “And I said, ‘Hell, when you start worrying about what them heathen folk think anyway?’  
    “He just cut up laughing at me ‘cause I don’t never cuss. But he weren’t finished yet; we had lots of talking to do that day and most of it was about you. That’s when he started telling me about your letters. He loved you, Mr. Stephen. He had a hard time putting actions into words, but that didn’t change his heart none.”  
    Stephen frowned. Then why had Dustin left him so decimated in the flat back in London? Why had he abandoned his own feelings, his own heart? Bloody hell, why hadn’t he answered one single letter? But Stephen knew the answer to that already; the answer sat right in front of him and it shamed Stephen to think of all the anger, jealousy, and envy he had poured onto Robbie without ever having met him. How many times had he secretly wished that Robbie had not survived the lightning strike just so that he could have had Dustin for himself?  
    “It was probably good for him to talk to you,” he told Robbie quietly, hearing his own jealousy trying to creep into his words.  
    “You was what was good for him, Mr. Stephen. You. But Dusty didn’t think he could have none of it, didn’t think he was allowed,” Robbie said as he waved his hand around the diner, “this place being what it is and all.”  
    Stephen looked down at his hands and said nothing. There was nothing he could say. This place had ignorance ingrained into it. He had lost, Robbie had lost, and Dustin had lost most of all.  
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Stephen.”  
    Stephen looked up at him. “For what?”  
    Robbie drew a deep breath before he spoke. “For taking him from you,” he answered as he let the breath out. “He wouldn’t ever have come back here if it weren’t for me. And if he hadn’t come back, he wouldn’t be...” He shook his head and trailed off to silence.  
    “Robbie, you don’t have anything to apologize for,” Stephen said. “If anything, it should be me apologizing.”  He looked out the window and kept talking, knowing the truth of his words even as he spoke them. “He wouldn’t have come back with me. This was all just a dream. You’re his brother; he had to come back because he loved you, not out of some sense of duty to you. If he was still...here, he’d be irate that I had come at all.” He turned and looked Robbie in the eye. “I think we both know that’s true.”  
    “’Spect so,” Robbie answered. “But that didn’t curb his real feelings for you, Mr. Stephen. One thing I always knowed about Dusty, he hated deep; but he