Thirty years after a pact made in youth, two old friends reunite in a small-town diner on Christmas Day. When a stranger arrives in place of the third, buried truths begin to surface, and nothing about the past is quite the way they remembered it.

When you make a promise at 30, you think you will keep it because 30 doesn’t feel far from forever.

You believe time will stay manageable, that faces will remain familiar, and that friendships forged in youth will survive simply because they once felt unbreakable.

But 30 years is a strange thing, too.

It doesn’t rush in all at once. It slips by quietly, taking pieces with it, until one day you realize how much has changed without asking your permission.

“Man, I hope they show up,” I said to myself.

I was standing outside May’s Diner on Christmas morning, watching snow slide from the edge of the roof and melt into the pavement below.