“Oh—I almost forgot.”

Newt stopped just inside Hermann's front door. Hermann paused, hand on the handle.

Newt opened his messenger bag and rummaged inside. “I wanted to give this... back to you...”

As he felt around between folders and crumpled receipts, his eyes slid through the door to the living room. An ottoman, a few neat cardboard boxes. One box was labeled Records. Newt felt a twist of longing as he looked at the box, at the old record player beside it. His hand closed around what he was looking for in his bag.

“Here. You left this scarf in my office in, like, December?” He said it thoughtfully, as if he didn’t know quite when, and as if he hadn’t given it much thought since then. “I wanted to make sure you got it back.”

Newt held out the scarf.

Hermann took it, meeting his eyes for a brief second. “Thank you.” The soft cable knit threaded through Newt’s hand and away. Then it was gone, and Newt was saying goodbye and getting into the car and bumping down the long dirt driveway, tall green sunlit fields of grass sliding by on either side and birds swooping in the sunset and he was crying, crying for no reason at all.

He had found Hermann’s scarf in the studio in December. He’d left it there on the day of their visit to Rainsford Island. Newt had texted him about it, actually. It was one of the last texts in their thread:

But in the chaos that next day, the scarf had stayed hanging on the back of a chair, forgotten. For the next six months Newt had kept it on the hook on the back of his office door. It was an ordinary machine knit scarf, blue and gray striped; classy, like Hermann; a little grandpa-ish, like Hermann.

In the intervening months, when Newt zoned out, he would often stare at the scarf like he was looking out a window. He never took it home, never really touched it. It just hung there like the flag of a forgotten nation. Some days, his leather jacket hung on the hook next to it, and the casual pairing's simulated domesticity tore his stomach up.

Newt turned onto the paved road, blinking away the pointless tears in the harsh sunlight. He didn’t like driving, but ritzy Lincoln left him no choice, so Mako had lent him her car. The road took him to Route 128, where with a shuddering sigh he joined the evening traffic homebound.

He felt hungover or just-post-punch-drunk. He felt weird, he felt unreal. He had been like a ghost in that big house.

The traffic stopped dead, and he closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids the windows of the Lincoln house paraded past, framing soft green grass and dark trees beyond. A house in which he didn’t belong, a house of rooms he’d never see, a house with a turntable he would never put a record onto. And that was fine. It was all fine, he would cry it out and then go home and sleep and it would all be fine.

Six months was a long time. A long time to think of someone and never see them. A long time to imagine and forget and recreate.

Newt clamped his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut.

Someone honked. He opened his eyes. He let the car roll forward a few yards. In the line drive of late afternoon sunlight, they were stalled beside a vast marsh, half in shadow. A one half-fallen tree leaned over the water, leaves still green. Newt admired the tree for a moment, sniffing and wiping his eyes. Traffic rolled forward. He turned on the radio.

“Okay, okay. It’s okay,” he said softly to himself.

With a sniff, he flipped through the stations.

It wasn't over. That was what he'd been so afraid of, he realized—that Hermann had gone forever. He wiped the last tears away, breathing returning slowly to normal.

Hermann was back. It wasn't over.

It was different now; maybe it always would be.

Now, they would find out what that meant.

He paused on WERS, then decided he wasn’t in the mood for college radio. 92.9 was playing Tainted Love and he smiled, wiping his eyes. The song always made him think of that Christmas party at the Columbia radio station. His first radio job. His first college party makeout. Where was Tim now, he wondered.

He sang along quietly, wondering what records Hermann had in that box. Since he would never know, he felt free to speculate. Probably symphonies, concertos. Definitely some opera. Maybe New Order, or Lou Reed. In this fantasy, Newt decided that Hermann had, in college, been cool for about ten minutes and bought a New Order record. Maybe he’d kept it all these years despite himself.

“For I toss and turn,” Newt sang along quietly, “I can't sleep at night...”