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“I’m a grown woman,” Alli laughed. “I’m sitting in a nice office eating delicious pizza. I think he would be far more worried about my last job when I was racing to fires or crime scenes. This is pretty tame in comparison.”

“I keep forgetting that you used to be a reporter. Did you love it?”

“I did,” she admitted. “But it’s a tough way to make a living. It’s a shrinking job market, and the pay sucks, even worse than the hours. For years, Brian would tell me to get what he called a normal job with regular hours and dental.”

“It sounds like you and your brother are close. That’s why you moved back here?”

“It is,” she confirmed. “He loves it here.”

“But you both grew up elsewhere?”

“We grew up everywhere,” she replied. If anything, her answer understated things. “You want the whole answer or the dinner-party answer?"

"Which one's true?"

"Both. One's shorter."

"I've got time," Sam said, "and you've got half a slice left, so you're not going anywhere."

"My parents didn't settle," she said. “Anywhere. That's the whole thing, really. We moved every couple of years, sometimes more. There was always something better one town over. Bigger, brighter, cheaper, warmer. It was always going to be better. It would be paradise, they promised. My dad would come home with a certain look on his face, and my mom would already be pulling boxes out of the garage. They didn't even have to discuss it. They were in perfect agreement, always, about the fact that wherever we were wasn't it."

"Where are they now?"

"New Mexico, last I heard. They bought an RV." She smiled, and it felt only slightly like work. "They're semi-retired now and still looking."

She doubted they would ever find what they were looking for. She wasn’t sure it existed, to be honest.

"Last you heard," Sam repeated.

"They're not big on check-ins. I want to be fair to them. They love us. They're not villains. They're just different, that’s all. They probably shouldn't have had kids. They were so wrapped up in each other, and in the next place, and Brian and I were sort of… luggage. Beloved luggage. But we were along for the ride, and everybody knew it."

Sam was quiet long enough that she looked over.

"That doesn’t sound like much fun,” he said.

"Yeah," she said. "It wasn’t, especially as a kid, constantly changing schools and having to make new friends. Eventually, I didn’t really bother. There was no point since I would be leaving anyway.”

There had been no proms, homecoming, or Friday night football games for Alli. She’d been alone those last few years of high school. Always “the new girl.”

"So Brian moved back."

"Brian moved back." She was grateful for the redirect and took it. "One year, that's all we were here. And out of everywhere we ever lived, this is the place that stuck for both of us. He came back the first second he could."

"And you came back for him."

"I came back because I lost my job," she said, "which is the dinner-party answer." She looked at the window, at their reflections sitting a little too close together in the glass. "The true one is I didn’t really have any place else to be.”

She heard it as it came out and immediately wanted it back.

"Sorry," she said. "That's more than you asked for."

"No," Sam said. "It isn't."

His fingers absently played with the crumpled paper napkin next to his plate.

"My father was there," he said. "Physically. Every day of my childhood, he was in that house. He just wasn't available. We had everything we needed and nothing we actually wanted." He stopped. "He had a favorite. Zack. The oldest. He never bothered to hide it. He'd have said hiding it was dishonest, and he was very proud of being honest. That's what he called it."

"What would you call it?"