"So it's complicated." At Caleb's age, Darlington had been more focused on the day-to-day of his survival, of keeping Black Elm running and preserving as much as he could the illusion that nothing at all had changed despite his grandfather's death and his parents' subsequent desertion, to pursue much of a relationship with anyone at all. It had been its own kind of complicated, and in truth, he's not sure which he might have preferred.

"I hope it works out, somehow."