Yelena looks down on the city, her eyes wide.

“Everything here is so . . . grand,” she says. “It’s all on such a massive scale.”

“Does it make you feel tiny?” I ask her.

“It does . . . and it doesn’t. It makes me feel insignificant . . . but also like I could accomplish anything here. Like there’s no limit.”

“What would you do?” I ask her. “If you could do anything?”

“I don’t know . . .” she says, looking down at the spreading grid of streets and high rises. “I guess . . . I’d like to go to school for music. Not as a performer—for composition. I get these melodies playing in my head . . . I wish I was better at arranging them and setting them down.”

“I want to hear you play,” I tell her. I’ve been curious for a while.

Yelena flushes. “I told you, I haven’t practiced in a long time. There’s no piano in our new house.”

“There is at mine,” I say.

It was my mother’s, and it’s still upstairs in her music room. Nobody uses it anymore, except Aida on rare occasions. But I know my father would never get rid of it.

He’s not home today, surprisingly. Aida roped him into some dinner with Fergus and Imogen Griffin, and a bunch of people from the Chicago Literary Society. Maybe she thought he’d like it, since he’s one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. Or maybe she was just desperate to get him out of the house and thought that was a good excuse.

Regardless of the reason, it means I can show Yelena my mother’s music room without having to make awkward introductions.

“You want to show me your house?” Yelena says.

“Yes.”

“Alright. But I want to stand in that glass box first,” she says.

The box in question is suspended from the side of the building, about 1300 feet in the air. The floor is completely transparent, as are the walls.

“You want to get in there?” I say, in surprise.

“Yes,” she says, firmly.

As we approach, I can see shivers running up and down her body. Her face is pale, and her lips are white.

I don’t want to try to talk her out of it, so I just take her arm instead, to help steady her steps.

She clings to my bicep, shuffling her feet along like she’s scared to even pick them up. Bit by bit, we go into the box until we’re entirely outside the Willis Tower, floating in the air with only a few inches of plexiglass between us and an endless drop.

Yelena looks like she might pass out. Her expression is equal parts horrified and fascinated.

“I don’t know why this scares me so much,” she says. “Logically, I know it’s safe—hundreds of people stand in here every day without falling. Still, my whole body is screaming at me.”

Her muscles are tight with tension. She forces herself to look down, even as a soot-gray swift soars by directly beneath our feet.

I can’t help but be impressed by her force of will. Her desire to push her own limits.

I usually do what comes naturally to me. I don’t often force myself to do the opposite of what I like.

At last, Yelena lets out a little sigh and says, “Alright, we can go now.”

She seems calm and relieved as we head back toward the elevator.

“Maybe you’re just a masochist,” I tease her.

“I could be,” Yelena says quietly. “Sometimes when you’re denied the usual pleasures . . . you find other ways to entertain your mind.”

She’s alluded to the fact that her home life hasn’t been happy, though she doesn’t often give me specifics. She much prefers to talk about her brother, who she adores, versus her father.

I want to learn everything about her, but she’s tricky—like a puzzle box where you have to line up every piece perfectly to get it to open up. Often, right when I think we’re getting closer to each other, she pulls away again.

I can tell it’s going to take a long time for her to truly trust me.

I drive Yelena back to my family’s house on Meyer Avenue. It’s a massive old Victorian mansion on a heavily wooded lot. The trees grow so thick all around that you can only see bits and pieces of the house as you approach. The parts you can see don’t look particularly impressive—the gables are sagging with age, and the wooden trim needs painting. The leaded windows look mysterious and dark, even in the daytime.

But to me, it’s the most beautiful old house imaginable. Every bit of it is home. I love the creaks and groans, the scent of the dusty drapes and the oiled wood floors.

I park on the street so I can take Yelena inside through the front door, instead of via the underground garage. We walk through the front garden, which is full of fragrant lilac bushes, black cherry trees, and boxelder maples. A stone bird bath reflects a circle of sky like a mirror.

The wooden steps are sagging, covered in blown lilac blossoms. As we crush them beneath our feet, that sweet scent rises up, warm and summery.

“Have you always lived here?” Yelena asks me.

“All my life. Until I moved on campus for school.”

“What was it like being at college?” Yelena asks me. “Just like in the movies?”

I consider. Before this month, I would have told you that was the happiest time in my life: surrounded by friends, famous at my school, playing a sport I loved, and barely paying attention to my classes. Parties every weekend and games I treated with the seriousness of an all-out war.

But now . . . it’s all starting to seem a little silly. I was a kid, playing a game. Reveling in the attention.

I think about all the high-fives and the pats on the back, and they don’t seem particularly valuable anymore.

Now I think that I’d prefer the approval of just one person . . . if it was the right person.

“Yeah, it was like in the movies,” I tell her. “Only the cafeteria food is even worse than you think.”

Yelena smiles. She’s already learned how much I love food.

“That must have been hard for you,” she says.

“It was. I almost wasted away.”

I unlock the front door. I still have my key. All the Gallo children have keys. This will always be our home, no matter where we go.

“No guard?” Yelena says in surprise.

“There’s an alarm system, and cameras,” I tell her. “But we don’t have live-in security.”

She frowns. “Your father lives here alone?”

“With our housekeeper.”

I call out for Greta, but she doesn’t answer. She’s probably grocery shopping—taking the opportunity to dawdle around to all her favorite shops while my father is out.

“Too bad,” I say. “I wanted you to meet her.”

Yelena still looks uncomfortable at our lack of security—probably because her father’s house is so closely guarded at all times. She might be right. When Dante and Nero were living here, it wasn’t a concern. But we do have plenty of old enemies who might still hold a grudge.

I take her through the main part of the house—the ancient sitting room, with its portraits of ancestors long dead. My father’s library, which is stuffed with every book he’s ever read.

Then I show her my old room, papered with posters signed by Kobe Bryant and John Stockton.