Topper Thornton had known Rafe Cameron since they were twelve years old, which was when his parents had joined the country club and the Camerons had been seated two tables over at the summer lobster boil.
That was eight years ago.
Eight years of boats and parties and the kind of friendship that came from having the same problems, too much money, fathers who measured everything, an island that expected you to be a certain kind of loud.
Topper knew Rafe the way you knew a brother: not by choice, but by accumulation.
All those hours stacked up until you couldn’t remember not knowing him.
He knew, for instance, that Rafe didn’t show up for morning practice.
Rafe talked about rowing the way he talked about everything — with the confidence of a person who believed he could do it if he felt like it — but the showing-up part had always been theoretical.
For two years Topper had been the one at the boathouse at six, pulling his weight in the four-seat while Rafe’s seat sat empty and Reynolds made notations on his clipboard that Topper knew meant “Cameron, absent, as usual.”
So when Rafe walked into the boathouse at five-forty-five on a Tuesday morning, showered and alert in a way that Topper associated with other people entirely, the first thing Topper did was look behind him to see if someone else was following.
“You’re here,” Topper said.
“I’m here.”
“You’ve been here twice this week.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s not even six.”
“Also true.”
Topper stared at him.
Rafe was already walking toward the rack, pulling down his oars, doing the pre-launch routine that Topper had seen him do maybe ten times total in the last two years.
The motions were competent.
They had always been competent.
Rafe was a natural athlete, the kind of kid who could show up after three weeks off and still pull a cleaner stroke than half the team.
The motions were also relaxed, which was the part that didn’t fit.
Rafe at practice was tense.
Rafe at practice was distracted, irritable, prone to snapping at the coxswain and blaming the boat when his own form slipped.
Rafe at practice was not relaxed.
This Rafe, whatever was happening with this Rafe, was relaxed.
“You feeling okay?” Topper said.
“I’m feeling fine, Top. Let’s row.”
They rowed.
The morning was cool and the water was flat and the shell cut through it the way it always did, a clean line from the dock to the turn buoy and back.
Rafe was in the seven-seat, Topper in the four.
From the four-seat, Topper could watch Rafe’s back: the rhythm of his shoulders, the timing of his catch, the way his head stayed steady through the recovery stroke.
It was good.
It was really good.
It was the kind of rowing that Rafe Cameron was supposed to be doing, the kind that made Reynolds nod from the launch instead of shouting corrections through the megaphone.
At the dock, after, the team was milling around with water bottles and towels, and someone.
Kelce, probably, because Kelce was the one who always started things, said: “Yo, is Rafe Cameron actually at practice?”
“Two days in a row,” someone else said.
“Somebody check the weather.”
“End times,” Kelce said.
“Repent.”
The joke landed the way team jokes land: the first iteration was an offering, a test, a way of saying we’ve noticed and we’re not sure what to do with it.
Rafe could have taken it badly.
The old Rafe would have taken it badly.
The old Rafe would have bristled and shot something back and the whole thing would have turned into the kind of friction that made Reynolds pinch the bridge of his nose and wish he’d gone into golf.
Rafe just shrugged.
“I show up now. That’s the whole story.”
He said it flat, almost offhand, and then he walked past them toward the boathouse with his oars on his shoulder and his water bottle in his hand.
The team looked at each other.
Topper looked at Rafe’s back.
“Since when,” Kelce said quietly.
No one had an answer.
Topper found Rafe in the boathouse, putting his oars away.
The boathouse was quiet: the rest of the team was on the dock, still talking, still trying to figure out the equation that was Rafe Cameron at practice two days in a row.
Topper leaned against the doorframe and watched his friend rack his equipment with the same unhurried competence he’d shown on the water.
“So,” Topper said.
“What’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Rafe. Come on.” Topper crossed his arms.
Topper was a person who crossed his arms when he was trying to figure something out, and the arm-crossing was a tell that Rafe would normally have mocked, and today he didn’t.
“You show up at five-forty-five. You pull a clean stroke. You don’t bite Kelce’s head off when he makes a joke about it. Something is different.”
“Maybe I just felt like showing up.”
“You never just feel like showing up. That’s not a thing you do.” Topper uncrossed his arms.
Then he crossed them again.
“I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying — I’ve known you since sixth grade, man. You don’t do things without a reason. And the Rafe I know — ”
“Is the Rafe I’m trying not to be.”
The words came out before Topper could finish his sentence, and they came out quiet, and they came out true in a way that Topper didn’t have a response for.
He stood in the doorway and looked at his friend and felt something shift, not break, not collapse, but shift, the way a heavy piece of furniture shifts when you push it from the right angle.
The shift was unsettling.
The shift was also, in a way Topper couldn’t name, a relief.
“Weird,” Topper said finally.
“What’s weird.”
“This. You. The whole thing. It’s weird.” He paused.
“Weird-good. I think. I don’t know. I’m still deciding.”
“Take your time.”
“I will.”
They walked out to the parking lot together.
The sun was fully up now and the heat was starting to build, the thick Carolina heat that settled over the island by mid-morning and didn’t lift until dark.
Topper drove a white Range Rover that his parents had given him for his eighteenth birthday, and Rafe drove a black SUV that Ward had given him for his seventeenth, and the two cars sat side by side in the parking lot like a monument to everything that was wrong with Figure Eight.
“Same time tomorrow?” Topper said.
“Same time tomorrow.”
“Cool.” Topper got in his car.
He started the engine.
Then he leaned out the window.
“Hey. Whatever you’re doing. The — program, or whatever. It’s working. Just so you know.”
Rafe nodded.
It was a small nod, almost imperceptible, and then he got in his car and drove away, and Topper sat in his Range Rover with the engine running and tried to figure out what the hell had just happened to his best friend.
The thing was: Rafe Cameron was a lot of things.
He was loud and he was quick and he had a temper that could go from zero to catastrophic in the space of a wrong word.
He was generous with money and careless with people and he held grudges the way other people held onto photographs.
He was the kind of friend you kept because you’d always kept him, because letting him go would mean admitting that the friendship had been a mistake, and Topper wasn’t ready to admit that.
But this Rafe, this Rafe at practice, this Rafe who pulled clean strokes and let jokes land without retaliation, this Rafe who said “I show up now” like it was a simple fact instead of a declaration, this Rafe was something else.
Something that Topper didn’t have a word for.
Something that felt, against all odds, like a person who was actually trying.
Weird-good, Topper decided, alone in the car.
Weird, but good.
He put the Range Rover in gear and drove home, and the whole way he kept turning the morning over in his mind: the easy rhythm of the catch, the relaxed shoulders, the flat “I show up now” that wasn’t defensive and wasn’t proud and wasn’t anything except true.
Something had changed.
Topper didn’t know what.
Topper didn’t know if he was supposed to be worried or relieved.
He landed on relieved.
Provisionally.
The way you land on a verdict when the evidence is still coming in.