At 4:21, three minutes after I killed my own engagement, my mother called.
I watched her name glow across the screen.
VIVECA RAVENSWORTH.
I let it ring, and buzz, and go dark, and light up again two seconds later, and I turned the phone facedown on the leather seat of the car that had come back for me and looked out the tinted window at the gray city sliding past.
She called four more times before I silenced it entirely and dropped it in the cup holder.
I already knew, without being able to say how, that whatever was about to come apart, my mother’s hands were somewhere inside it.
“Tribeca,” I told the driver.
Ten minutes later I stood outside my own oak door, and used my code, and pushed it open quietly, and stepped into the entryway of a home I barely lived in — cedar and fresh paint and the smell of the rain coming off the windows.
And I stopped, because the place had changed in an hour.
It had people in it.
Chapter 10 — In My Own Living Room
The four boys were on the big cashmere rug in the living room.
Tobias and Thaddeus were racing two little metal cars along the seams of the floorboards, murmuring engine noises.
Torin and Tennison were asleep, curled into each other in the corner of the sofa like two commas, worn out by a world that had been far too cold to them for far too long.