“You think?” Harold snapped. “You disappeared into a black hole—or so you said—and I’m the one with the weird thumb?”

Harold blinked. “The first?”

For the first time in three months, Harold didn’t hear an echo. Just the quiet hum of a family, broken and strange and somehow still together, passing the mashed potatoes one last time before the end of the world.

“No. You left. You left us, and now you show up talking about flamingos?” Her voice cracked.

His mother looked at the photographs. She looked at her ex-husband. She looked at her son, whose thumb was glowing like a tiny, anxious galaxy.