He hit send to accept the call, but he didn’t answer.

“I just heard,” Blay said across the connection. “How are you doing?”

Qhuinn opened his mouth to reply, his brain coughing up all kinds of responses: Peachy fucking jim-dandy. At least I’m not “fat” like my sister. No, I don’t know if my brother got laid.

Instead, he said, “They got me out of the house. They didn’t want me to curse the transition. Guess it worked because Luchas sure looks like he came through it okay.”

Blay swore softly.

“Oh, and he got his ring just now. My father gave him… his ring.”

The signet ring with the family crest on it, the symbol that all males of good bloodlines wore to attest to their value to their lineage.

“I watched Luchas put it on his finger,” Qhuinn said, feeling as if he were taking a sharp knife and drawing it up the insides of his arms. “Fit perfectly. Looked great. You know, though… like, how could it not—”

He began weeping at that point.

Just fucking lost it.

The awful truth was that under all his counterculture fuck-you, he wanted his family to love him. As prissy as his sister was, as scholar-geek as his brother was, as reserved as his parents were, he saw the love between those four. He felt the love among them. It was the tie that bound them, the invisible string from one heart to the others, the commitment of caring about everything from the mundane shit to any true, mortal drama. The only thing more powerful than that connection… was what it was like to get shut out from its expression.

Every fucking night of your life.

Blay’s voice cut in through the heaving. “I’m here for you. And I’m so damned sorry… I’m here for you… just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Let me come over—”

Leave it to Blay to know that he was thinking about things that involved ropes and showerheads.

In fact, his free hand had already gone down to the makeshift belt he’d fashioned out of a nice, strong weave of nylon—because his parents didn’t give him money for clothes and the one proper buckle-and-strap combo he’d owned had broken years ago.

Pulling the length free, he glanced across to the closed door of his bath. All he needed to do was tie the thing to the fixture in his shower—God knew those water pipes had been run in the good old days when things were strong enough to hold some weight. He even had a chair he could stand up on and then kick out from underneath him.

“I gotta go—”

“Qhuinn? Don’t you hang up on me—don’t you dare hang up on me—”

“Listen, man, I gotta go—”

“I’m coming over right now—” Lot of flapping in the background like Blay was getting his shit together. “Qhuinn! Do not hang up the phone—Qhuinn…!”

CHAPTER ONE

Present Day

Market Street and 17th

Downtown Caldwell, New York

Oh, shit! Dad is going to kill us—”

“What are you talking about, ‘us’? I’m not driving—”

“You’re in the car, Terrie! And not because I kidnapped you—”

The two Allaine sisters were talking over each other, talking over the radio that was still playing loud enough to be heard in the suburbs they’d left, talking over the accident that had just occurred. They were also going nowhere, the front grille of the burgundy 2018 BMW 5 series embedded in the face of a dirty, downtown snowbank that loomed big as a mountain.

“I know I’m in the car, Ellen,” the twelve-year-old snapped. “But you’re the one who crashed us!”

“It wasn’t my fault, Therese!” Elle punched the radio button, which canned the music and turned up the volume on two things she was so not interested in dealing with: whatever wasn’t ever going to work again under the hood and her stupid sister’s opinion on what had just happened. “Something ran out in front of the car. It was not my fault—”