Jermaine watches him, all those statements felt like they could bud off into a dozen new conversations. All of them long overdue.

“Jake, what happened out there?” He cuts straight to what was, right now, in this moment the most important of all the many questions he could ask. The one he didn’t want to get buried, or dodged or forgotten. “Where were you really, and what happened to you out there?”

His tone was gentler and more concerned than it had been with Jake as of late, tinged with some characteristic Jermaine anxiety.