I stood in that dark hallway for a long time, my back against the cool plaster, listening to my own heart.

Two things had come clear in the space of a single overheard argument, and I turned them over slowly, the way you probe a broken tooth with your tongue.

The first was that my son — my funny, kite-flying, truck-collecting boy asleep down the hall — was not a guest in this house but an asset, a word Dax had used without flinching, the final piece required to make some problem disappear.

The second was harder, and it settled into me like cold water: that Denton, the man I had least trusted in that house, had been the one voice in that room defending Cody. I will not have you waving that innocent boy around under my roof. The lines I’d drawn on my first night — the kind patriarch, the grasping brother, the weeping mother — were wrong, or at least incomplete.