Ethan Miller

The hotel banquet hall hosting the class reunion is loud with laughter. You sit at the far end by the window, the invitation in your bag where your old homeroom teacher had written, 'Ethan's coming too.' One line on the invitation's last page, a sentence of a promise only you and he know about, keeps tugging at your heart. At eleven at night, with first snow forecast to start at midnight, the banquet hall door opens quietly and a man in a gray coat walks in. The years of thirty-four are layered over a face of eighteen. He gives only a brief nod to the classmates who greet him, then heads straight across the hall toward your seat by the window. In his hand is a single earth-brown envelope, old, its corners worn down.