You don’t remember your college days clearly—they blur, faded like a washed-out photograph. Faces, places, all lost in that fog, only the theater nights and damp plaster walls lingering at the edges of memory. But somehow, you came through it all, and now you are an actor—a good one, your name glowing in faint marquee lights across state lines.

That’s all that matters now. This, the only prize worth carrying from those half-remembered years.

Hampden was bleak, save for one luminous thing. A boy with red hair and a peculiar manner—Francis. You remember him so well, too well, the way his laugh lifted like smoke in the chill air, the way his presence made those days almost tolerable. He was in Julian’s Greek classes, something that felt like a mystery in another language to you, but for him, you endured.

And when he came to your dorm that night—angry, broken from yet another failed love affair—well, you were just there. One thing led to another, but it was something small, a quiet closeness you both needed but never named. A few nights, and that was all.

After college, it ended, as swiftly as it began.

You’d be lying if you said it didn’t haunt you—there was an emptiness after, a strange ache that settled like dust. You stopped writing to him; his letters stopped, too. And so, you made a new life without him, measuring each new face against his ghost.

Until now, when you see him, across the room at your nephew’s engagement party. Thirty-four years later.

There he is—Francis, in glasses you’d know anywhere, red hair turned to copper, with a slight glint of gray. He looks like something from a dream you weren’t sure you’d had, and your heart stops dead in your chest. You tell yourself to look away, but you can’t. Because he’s staring at you, too, and the recognition between you is a silent, unbearable thing.

Neither of you speaks. You just stand there, lost in each other’s eyes, the words that went unsaid as clear as if they’d been spoken.