The walk home was quieter than the walk to school. That was usually how it worked — the morning walk belonged to anticipation, which had a lot to say for itself, and the afternoon walk belonged to what had actually happened, which often needed less discussion.

They were past the hardware store before Emma spoke.

'What did Tyler want at the diamond?'

Jake glanced at her. 'You saw that?'

'I was at the back window of the gym. I saw him come around the fence.'

Jake was quiet for a half-block. 'He told me his fastball clocked seventy-one at camp.'

'What did you say?'

'I said that's fast.'

Emma thought about this. 'Is it fast?'

'For seventh grade, yes.'

'So he's good.'

'He's fast,' Jake said. 'That's not the same thing.'

Emma looked at him. There was a distinction in there that he wasn't going to elaborate on — she knew this, and also knew that pressing it would produce a longer silence rather than more words. Jake said what he wanted to say the first time. If you wanted the explanation, you had to ask the right question, not just wait.

'What's the same as being fast?' she asked.

Jake thought about it. 'Throwing the same pitch forty times and having thirty-seven of them go exactly where you aimed. That's closer.'

'Thirty-seven out of forty.'

'For now. It'll be better by Friday.'

Emma believed him. She had watched Jake work with enough consistency over enough time to know that when he said something would be better, it was because he'd already identified what needed to change and was in the process of changing it. He didn't say things like that as motivation. He said them as observation.

'Dad asked about your serve,' Jake said.

Emma slowed almost imperceptibly. 'When?'

'Last week. I called him to talk about the lineup and he asked if you'd been working on your serve.'

'What did you say?'

'I said yes.'

'That's all?'

'That's what he asked.'

Emma thought about this. Their father lived two hours north of Lakeview, in a rented house near the paper mill where he'd been working for three years. He called on Sundays, when he remembered. When he forgot, neither of them mentioned it. He was interested in them in the way that a person could be interested in something from a distance — genuinely, she thought, but from a distance. The fact that he'd asked about her serve was the kind of small thing that could mean nothing, or could mean that he'd been paying more attention than she knew. She hadn't decided which yet.

'People who talk a lot about how ready they are,' she said, half to herself, half to Jake, 'usually aren't.'

'Tyler?'

'Generally.'

Jake made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite dismissal, which was his way of acknowledging a statement without fully endorsing it. They walked through the block with the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the corner place that sold Italian ice in summer and soup in winter and had been doing this for as long as either of them could remember.

Emma stopped at the library.

'I have a hold,' she said.

Jake sat on the bench outside, as he always did, because Jake believed that libraries were places where people went to be quiet and that his job during library trips was to wait on the bench and be available when the library part was done.

Inside, the afternoon light came through the high windows and fell on the reading tables in long pale rectangles. Mrs. Okafor was at the circulation desk, already reaching for the shelf behind her before Emma had finished her name.

'It's been waiting since last week,' Mrs. Okafor said. 'Someone had it out and brought it back late. I set it aside when it came in.'

She handed Emma a slim hardcover — a library copy of a field guide to Michigan freshwater systems, which Emma had put on hold for a project she'd been half-planning since the summer. It was older than she'd expected, the cover worn and slightly faded, the kind of book that had been checked out many times and carried the quiet accumulation of all those trips in the texture of its spine.

Emma thanked her and turned for the door. She was already tucking the book into her bag when she felt something that shouldn't have been there — a foldedness between the pages, something stiff and separate from the book itself. She paused, opened the front cover, and pulled it out.

It was a piece of paper. Old — yellowed and soft at the edges, the kind of old that suggested decades rather than years. It had been folded in thirds, horizontally, in a way that suggested it had been this way for a long time.

Through the window, she could see Jake on the bench outside, looking at his phone.

She almost unfolded the paper.

Then Jake looked up and saw her through the glass and lifted one hand — ready? She looked at the folded paper for another moment, then slid it back into the book, tucked the book into her bag, and went outside.

'What'd you get?' Jake asked.

'Field guide. Michigan freshwater systems.'

'Interesting summer reading.'

'It's for a project.'

They walked the last four blocks home in the early evening light, the shadows getting long, the lake glimmering beyond the east edge of the neighborhood. Emma's bag was on her shoulder, slightly heavier than it had been that morning, the old folded paper somewhere inside it.

She didn't think about it again until she was already in bed.

And then she thought about it until she fell asleep.