Somewhere Only We Know - 20. The Edges of New Lives

The winter in Riverbend was beginning to soften, just slightly, the kind of change that wasn’t obvious on the streets but made itself known in the way the air smelled—less like frozen metal, more like damp earth waking from sleep. Kitt adjusted the collar of his jacket as he stepped out of the youth center late one afternoon, the sky a soft lavender, the streetlights flickering to life one by one. His hands still smelled faintly of washable paint and cheap cafeteria pizza, the “official meal” they fed the kids every Thursday. He was exhausted—deeply, bone-deep exhausted—but there was something strangely steady underneath it, a pulse of purpose he hadn’t felt since leaving Lakehurst.

His days now had shape: mornings at the Mexican restaurant, where steam and scrubbing and broken Spanish filled the hours; afternoons at the youth center, guiding little hands through finger-painting disasters and spelling games; evenings in his small apartment, trying to budget out what little money he had left. He still had nothing, really. But he had movement. He had work. He had people who saw him.

He had almost enough hope to get him through each day.

Mateo found him halfway home, leaning against a street sign with a grin that suggested he’d been waiting deliberately. His hoodie was pulled low, hands tucked into the sleeves, his breath forming thin clouds in the fading light.

“Long day?” Mateo asked, eyes sweeping Kitt’s face in that gentle way he always pretended wasn’t concern.

“Aren’t they all?” Kitt said with a tired laugh.

Mateo fell into step beside him without asking. “You’re getting good with kids. I saw you negotiating with that tiny girl who stole the glitter.”

Kitt groaned. “Don’t remind me. She threatened to ‘hex’ me.”

“I think she could,” Mateo deadpanned. “She has the energy for it.”

Kitt smiled, pushing his hands deeper into his pockets. Mateo’s presence was easy, familiar now, a quiet rhythm he didn’t have to think about.

“By the way…” Mateo began casually, though his voice betrayed the effort behind the casual tone, “Javier said he might be able to give you the Friday prep shift. No promises. But he’s thinking about it.”

Kitt’s chest tightened in gratitude. “Thank you.”

Mateo shrugged. “You don’t have to thank me every time I try to help you.”

“I do,” Kitt said softly. “Because no one else has.”

Mateo didn’t respond, but his eyes softened in a way that made Kitt look away before he could read too much into it.

. . .

Tom’s house smelled like cinnamon when Kitt stepped inside later that evening—Tom was experimenting with a new tea blend, something he found online that he insisted might “change the trajectory of his grading stamina.” Harbor bounded over immediately, tail thumping loudly against the floor, and Kitt laughed as he crouched to run his fingers through the dog’s warm fur.

“Rough day?” Tom asked as he poured tea into two mismatched mugs.

“Long,” Kitt admitted. “But… good. I think.”

Tom nodded as if he’d expected that answer. “I’ve seen the way the kids look at you. You’re good for them. You make them feel safe.”

Kitt blinked at the words, surprised by how deeply they hit. “I’m not… I don’t think I’m someone who makes people feel that.”

Tom gave him a look that was kind but firm. “You’d be surprised what young people pick up on. You’re gentle. Patient. And you listen. That’s more than most adults ever do.”

Kitt sat back, letting the warmth of the tea seep into his hands. “Sometimes I feel like I’m pretending. Like… I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”

Tom’s voice softened. “You’re supposed to be a teenager who’s been through hell and is still standing. That’s more than enough.”

Kitt looked down at his mug, throat tightening. Tom didn’t try to fill the silence; he knew when silence was part of healing.

A moment later, as if reading Kitt’s exhaustion, Tom added, “I talked to Leah. They can give you one more weekly shift if you want it. It’s not much money, but it’s something.”

Kitt’s breath stuttered. “You… did that for me?”

Tom shrugged lightly, though his eyes shone with warmth. “You’re worth helping.”

Something fragile inside Kitt trembled at that—gratitude laced with something else he didn’t dare name. He didn’t know how to handle having adults in his life again. Especially ones who cared.

. . .

Meanwhile, in Lakehurst, Matt pulled into the driveway with a heaviness that seemed to stick to him these days like a second skin. He tossed his gym bag into his room, barely noticing it slide to the floor. Practice had been brutal—his arm hurt, his back was stiff, and the coach told him to go home early before he “trained himself into a hospital visit.” But none of that mattered. His mind was somewhere else entirely.

On Riverbend.
On the diner.
On the slim chance he had brushed the edge of Kitt’s shadow without knowing.

His scholarship application was in. He had forced himself to finish it, every word sharpened with longing and determination. Northbridge wasn’t just their dream school anymore—it was the place he had to get to. A place that put him thirty minutes from Riverbend. Thirty minutes from hope.

Matt sat at the foot of his bed, rubbing at the ache in his chest. He thought of Kitt walking alone somewhere, cold and scared and trying to stay alive. Matt couldn’t fix everything. But he could put himself in the one place that made finding him more possible than ever.

That was the bold choice.
The only choice.

He would go to Northbridge.
And he would never stop looking.

Even if it took years.
Even if it broke him.
Even if it meant rebuilding his entire life around the hope of seeing Kitt again.

. . .

Stephen, on the other hand, was unraveling.

The pastor’s words had followed him home like ghosts, repeating themselves in the silent halls of the Wellington house. Susan had barely spoken to him since, moving around him like a shadow that wanted nothing to do with his light. Every domestic sound—running water, the closing fridge door, the creak of floorboards—seemed to accuse him.

At first, he tried to pray.
Then he tried to read.
Then he tried to justify himself.

But the silence grew louder, crushing him, squeezing under his ribs, making every breath feel like theft.

When Susan passed him the next morning without even glancing his way, something splintered in him. He didn’t understand any of this—how his son had slipped through his fingers, how the pastor had turned against him, how his wife had become a stranger. He clung harder to the only thing he trusted: anger.

“He’ll come home,” Stephen muttered to himself as he paced the living room. “He’ll come crawling back. He has to.”

But even as he said it, a thin thread of dread tightened around his chest.

Because he had no proof.
No signs.
No leads.
Not even a phone to trace.

All he had was silence.

And with every passing day, it hollowed him out a little more.

. . .

Back in Riverbend, Kitt lay awake long after midnight, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

The plaster above him was a spiderweb of thin gray lines, some old, some newly spreading like tiny fractures in bone. The overhead light had burned out weeks ago, so the room was lit only by the dull orange glow of the streetlamp leaking through the thin curtains. The mattress beneath him sagged toward the middle, its springs groaning every time he shifted his weight. He had learned to lie perfectly still just to keep the noise down.

Somewhere down the hall, a television droned through the wall—laughter from a late-night sitcom that didn’t sound funny at all. Pipes rattled behind the bathroom wall as someone upstairs ran the shower too long. The building smelled faintly of old carpet, damp wood, and cigarettes that had seeped into the walls years ago and never left.

His room wasn’t much more than a box.

A narrow bed.
A chair missing one rubber foot so it rocked if he leaned too far.
A small table where he kept his notebooks stacked carefully beside the secondhand lamp Tom had given him.

His clothes hung from the back of the door because there wasn’t a closet worth using. The window frame rattled when the wind picked up, letting cold air slip in around the edges.

Sometimes he wondered how many people had lived in this room before him—how many had passed through quietly, like temporary shadows.

His body was tired in the heavy way that came from long shifts at the restaurant, hours standing over hot sinks with his hands buried in soap and grease. His shoulders still ached from scrubbing pans, his fingertips rough from detergent. The youth center work in the afternoons wasn’t as physically exhausting, but by the time evening came his legs felt hollow.

Still, his mind wouldn’t rest.

The quiet of the room only made it louder.

He thought about Andy first—the easy way he moved through the world, joking even about things most people would hide. Andy made survival look like something almost casual, like the world’s judgment could roll off him without leaving a mark.

Then Tom.

Tom’s steady voice. The calm way he listened, never rushing him, never asking questions Kitt wasn’t ready to answer. Tom had given him food, books, guidance—things Kitt hadn’t realized he needed until they were placed gently in front of him.

Mateo drifted through his thoughts next.

Mateo with his crooked grin and loud music and careless Spanish phrases Kitt was slowly learning to understand. Mateo, who pretended everything was a joke but somehow always noticed when Kitt was having a bad day. Mateo, who had shared food from his own kitchen without asking questions.

Three people.

Three strange pieces of kindness in a town that had once felt like exile.

But even with them, something inside him still felt unfinished.

Because eventually his thoughts always circled back to the same place.

The lake.

He could almost see it when he closed his eyes—the quiet water, the worn wooden dock, the trees leaning over the shoreline like they were listening. That place had always belonged to him and Matt in a way the rest of the town never did.

And Matt.

Matt standing on the dock with his hands shoved into his hoodie pockets. Matt laughing too loud when Kitt beat him swimming to the far buoy. Matt looking at him sometimes with an expression that made Kitt’s chest tighten with something he hadn’t understood back then.

Now he understood it too well.

He turned slightly on the sagging mattress, staring again at the cracked ceiling.

The room felt smaller than usual tonight, the walls closing in with the quiet weight of everything he’d left behind and everything he still didn’t know how to face.

Riverbend had taught him how to survive.

But survival wasn’t the same thing as peace.

And somewhere far away—across miles of road and memories and unfinished conversations—was the one person who still made his heart feel like it belonged somewhere.

Kitt exhaled slowly into the darkness.

He thought of the lake.

He thought of Matt.

Matt’s laughter.
Matt’s warmth.
Matt’s promise.
Matt’s arms around him in the snow—words he never got to hear, a love he wasn’t sure he was allowed to hope for.

He buried his face in his pillow, swallowing a sob of exhaustion.

He missed him.
He missed him so much it felt like a bruise inside his chest that never healed.
No matter how much he worked, no matter how much he adjusted to Riverbend, no matter how much he tried to build something new—his heart still lived in Lakehurst, across the street from a house with a bright porch light and a boy who had always seen him.

Kitt whispered Matt’s name into the darkness, trembling.

He didn’t know that miles away, Matt was doing the same.

Two boys.
Two cities.
Two aching hearts still beating quietly toward one another.

But life was shifting around them now—gently for some, violently for others—and soon, nothing would stay the same.

. . .

Kitt woke the next morning to the hiss of the radiators and a slice of light sneaking through the gap in his curtain. For a moment, the old panic rose out of habit—the reflexive jolt of where am I, what happened, what did I lose?—but it faded faster now. The room was still small, the ceiling still cracked, his backpack still leaning against the wall like a tired dog, but it was his. His choice. His life.

He checked the clock, groaned softly, and swung his legs out of bed. The cold floor bit at his bare feet, but he moved anyway. He had a shift in the kitchen, and Javier did not tolerate lateness, not even from kids he grudgingly liked.

The restaurant was already steamy and loud when Kitt arrived. Pots clanged, oil sizzled, and someone swore in Spanish loud enough to rattle the metal racks. Javier barked an order across the line the second he saw him.

“¡Oye, Kitt! You’re on dish and prep. Onion, tomatoes, then pans. And don’t drown the plates this time.”

“Yes, sir,” Kitt called back, tying his apron.

The work was merciless but rhythmic. After an hour, his hands smelled like onion and dish soap, and the hot water had made his fingers prune and sting. But each pan he scrubbed was one more dollar toward rent. Each wiped surface was one step away from the boy who had run out into the snow with nothing but a backpack and a terror he could barely name.

There were small kindnesses here too. One of the cooks slid him a fresh tortilla with melted cheese, whispering “para ti” before winking and turning back to the line. Javier grumbled loudly about kids eating on the job, but he didn’t take it back. After the worst of the lunch prep, Javier slapped a folded schedule down beside the dish pit.

“I gave you Friday prep too,” he said, not looking at him. “You work hard. I need hard workers.”

Kitt stared at the paper, relief and gratitude filling him so fast it almost hurt. “Thank you. Really.”

“Don’t thank me,” Javier muttered, already turning away. “Just don’t die and make me train someone else.”

Kitt laughed under his breath and kept working.

By the time he slipped out the back door, the air outside felt almost gentle by comparison. He pulled his jacket tighter and walked toward the youth center, breath fogging in front of him, body buzzing with the ache of a long morning. On the way, he passed the park. It was quiet in the daylight—just a couple of people walking dogs, an older woman feeding birds. Not the dangerous, shadowed place it became at night.

He looked away quickly, grateful for the space between who he might have been and who he still had a chance to become.

At the center, Leah greeted him with a wave and a stack of laminated worksheets.

“You’re on homework corner today,” she said. “Congratulations. You’ve been promoted to math referee.”

Kitt blinked. “That sounds terrifying.”

“You’ll be great,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Just don’t let them know if you’re good at fractions. They’ll swarm.”

He laughed, surprising himself.

The hours slid by in a blur of pencils and complaints and kids complaining that math was “the real villain.” A quiet boy with bitten nails refused to speak above a whisper until Kitt sat beside him and worked through problems one by one, not rushing, not judging. A girl who reminded him painfully of his younger self kept apologizing for getting answers wrong, flinching each time.

Kitt’s heart tightened. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said gently. “Getting it wrong means you’re trying. That’s what matters here.”

She stared at him, like no one had ever said that to her before.

By late afternoon, the room smelled like washable markers and the kind of exhaustion that only children could inspire. Kitt was tired, on his third cheap coffee, and his back ached from bending over tables, but when one of the kids hugged him clumsily around the waist before leaving, mumbling “thank you,” he felt something startling and fragile push against his ribs.

He mattered here.

Even if it was in small, quiet ways.

. . .

Later that week, as the snow started to melt into grimy slush on the sidewalks, Riverbend felt less like a frozen purgatory and more like a place people actually lived. Kitt finished his youth center shift and stepped outside, the sky tinted bruised pink and gray. Mateo waited near the entrance, back against the wall, one foot braced, like leaning on the building was a job he took seriously.

“You’re late,” Mateo said, watching him approach.

“I stayed to help clean up glitter,” Kitt replied. “I’m pretty sure my soul is now permanently sparkly.”

Mateo huffed a laugh and fell into step beside him. “You look tired,” he observed, softer this time.

“I’m okay,” Kitt said. “Just… a lot of hours.”

“You sure you can handle both jobs?” Mateo asked, not accusing, just worried. “Restaurant, center, walking everywhere… you’re not a machine.”

“I know.” Kitt looked down at his gloved hands. “But I like it there. At the center. It feels… I don’t know. Less like I’m just barely staying alive.”

Mateo glanced sideways at him. “You seem different when you talk about that place.”

“Different how?”

“Less like you’re standing on a ledge,” Mateo said simply. “More like your feet are on the ground.”

The words settled in Kitt’s chest, heavier than they sounded.

They climbed the apartment stairwell in companionable silence. At Kitt’s door, Mateo lingered, not in the charged way of before, but in a comfortable, settled way that spoke of habit and choice.

“You need anything?” Mateo asked. “Food? Cash? Bad advice?”

Kitt smiled faintly. “I’ll take the bad advice later.”

“I have plenty,” Mateo said. “And hey… I’m proud of you.”

Kitt blinked. “For what?”

“For not falling apart.”

Kitt swallowed. “I feel like I am, sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Mateo said quietly. “But you don’t stay that way. That’s the difference.”

He left Kitt at his door and went upstairs, leaving behind a hallway that felt less suffocating than it once had.

. . .

Miles away, Lakehurst was thawing too.

The snowbanks shrank. The sidewalks showed themselves again, salt-scuffed and cracked. The lake where Matt and Kitt once spent long summer evenings was still rimmed with ice, but there were patches of dark water showing through, promising movement.

Matt lay on his bed with a textbook open in front of him, but his eyes had drifted to the Northbridge brochure pinned to his wall. The campus lawn gleamed with impossible green under sunny skies in the photograph, students scattered across it like a life he could barely imagine living.

His scholarship application was in. His coach had pulled him aside to say that if he kept this up, the recruiters would be paying attention by mid-fall. His teachers had noticed he was more focused, more disciplined. The frantic edges of his grief had sanded down into something sharper and narrower—a constant ache, but not the kind that made him reckless anymore.

He still searched.

Just not in the feverish way he had before.

Some nights he scrolled through community posts in Riverbend—fundraisers, local news, missing pet flyers, random photos from events. Other nights he pulled up bus maps, staring at routes that reached beyond Riverbend into neighborhoods he hadn’t checked yet. Once or twice, he typed Kitt’s full name into search bars, then immediately closed the screen, half convinced that seeing his name in public would break him.

He tuned himself like he tuned for football—slowly, patiently, knowing that playing the long game was the only way.

He wouldn’t give up.
But he also wouldn’t let himself fall apart so completely that there was nothing left to offer if he ever found Kitt again.

His mother knocked softly on his door.

“Matt? Dinner.”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” he called back.

He glanced at the photo on his nightstand—one of him and Kitt at the lake, taken by his sister a year ago. Kitt’s hair was still damp in it, his mouth open mid-laugh, his eyes crinkled at the corners.

“I’m going to get there,” Matt whispered to the picture. “I’m going to get to Northbridge. I swear I will.”

And when I do, he thought, not daring to say it out loud, I hope you’re close enough to find again.

. . .

In the Wellington house, the days blurred into a tense stalemate.

Susan moved around the kitchen with quieter footsteps now, as if afraid sound might shatter whatever fragile barrier was keeping her from screaming. She still made enough food for three plates out of muscle memory, but she stopped setting Kitt’s place at the table. The empty chair remained, untouched, a ghost of routine.

Stephen noticed every small change.

He watched her from the doorway sometimes as she worked—saw how her shoulders hunched slightly, how her eyes seemed to carry something heavier than tiredness. He wanted to explain himself, to justify his decisions, to say I did what was right, but every time he tried, the pastor’s words rose up like a wall in his throat.

A father does not cast out his child.

Another evening, he found himself standing in the doorway of what used to be Kitt’s room. The bed was still made, but the closet stood partially open, revealing gaps where clothes had once hung. The desk was empty. The shelf that had held trophies and small mementos now looked strangely bare.

He stepped inside, fingers brushing the windowsill, as if expecting to feel some lingering trace of his son’s presence.

He felt nothing.

He knelt to pick up a pencil on the floor, one Kitt must have dropped weeks or months before everything broke. It felt absurd and devastating at once—this tiny remnant of a life he had shoved away.

“How long are you going to pretend you didn’t do this?” Susan’s voice came from the doorway.

Stephen turned, startled. She stood there with her arms crossed, eyes rimmed red, face drawn with a pain she had learned to wear like armor.

“I was trying to—”

“Protect him?” she asked sharply. “From what? Himself? From being honest with you?”

“He’s living in sin,” Stephen said, but the words sounded thinner now, half-whispered, like something repeated too many times to be fully believed.

“He’s living somewhere out there,” Susan replied, voice cracking, “cold, alone, and you don’t even know if he’s safe.” Her eyes shone. “Do you know what it’s like, Stephen? Waking up every night wondering if our son is lying in a ditch somewhere? Or in a stranger’s car? Or… worse?”

He flinched.

She took a shaky breath. “I can’t forgive what you did. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

She stepped back from the doorway, leaving him alone in the room that no longer belonged to anyone.

For the first time, Stephen realized that his righteous anger had not only driven out his son—it had driven out his wife as well.

The house no longer felt like his domain.
It felt like an empty place he haunted.

. . .

In Riverbend, Kitt sat on his mattress with a notebook open in his lap. Tom had given it to him days ago, saying it might help to put his thoughts somewhere that wasn’t his chest. At first, the pages stayed blank. Then one night, and then another, he found himself filling them with small, messy pieces of his life now.

Not full sentences.
Not confessions.
Just fragments.

Thursday: Javier gave me an extra shift. Mateo pretended not to be happy about it.

Friday: A kid at the center said he wants to be “a dolphin doctor.” I didn’t know how to tell him that’s kind of a thing.

Saturday: I saw a guy at the park who looked like Matt from behind. My heart hurt for a full five minutes after I walked past him.

He tapped the pen against the paper, staring at that last line.

He had thought distance would numb things.

It hadn’t.

It had made the missing sharper, somehow, etched into him like something carved into wood. He still loved Matt—he knew that with a certainty that frightened him. But he had also learned something in the slow, grinding days of survival:

He could not build his life on waiting.

He had to build it on standing.

So he worked.
And he walked.
And he listened to Tom’s quiet guidance and Mateo’s louder teasing and Leah’s dry humor and the kids’ chaotic laughter.

And piece by piece, without meaning to, he began to grow into someone older than his years and more independent than he’d ever imagined he’d be.

Christmas of their senior year was still far away.
He didn’t know that.
Matt didn’t know that.
Neither did Stephen, or Susan, or anyone else caught in this quiet storm.

But time was moving.
And all of them were changing.

When the time finally came for their paths to collide again, none of them would be who they were the night everything shattered.

They would be something else.
Something more fragile and more unbreakable at the same time.

They would be ready, even if they didn’t know it.