Theo looked over at Jack, who seemed uncomfortable, biting his lip as he trailed off.

“I know it’s maybe nicer than what you’re used to, Gardner. But it’s one of the safest buildings in Baltimore, which I figured you’d like for when the kids are here.”

“True.”

They stepped into the elevator, and Theo entered in a second code, a light popping on for the top floor. Jack looked tense. Anxious and out of place. “It’s just—it’s so nice.”

“And you don’t deserve nice, hmm?”

The elevator didn’t seem to move at all, totally smooth and soundless. Theo leaned against one wall, while Jack propped himself against the wall opposite.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t think that you would think so. After everything I...”

“Well,” Theo looked down at the glossy elevator floor as he spoke, “What I think—” He paused, just a moment too long.

The doors opened.

“Holy shit.”

Theo didn’t look into the apartment at first, but watched the shock and wonder cross Jack’s face. He had forgotten—in all the publicity for his charity works, in Jack’s financial success, in his perfect family and picture up at Gwynns and all of that fabulous nonsense, it was easy to ignore the facts of Jack’s childhood. The ways he was already screwed up, long before—

He remembered the night they’d both struggled to close his window all the way. It was usually nice to keep the window open, the temperate Irish air blowing in over their skin, cooling their sweat, but that night it was a little colder after a day of steady rain. Theo tried to slide the window down, and then Jack attempted to put all those muscles to good use, but they couldn’t do it, and—

Jack was breathing too hard, showing the whites of his eyes like a spooked horse, freezing cold and sweating buckets. Theo panicked at the look on his face, wrapped him up in blankets, holding him, as Jack started to speak in a toneless voice as if he couldn’t stop himself.

The apartment in Bolton Hill. His bedroom window, stuck open, and how he slept in his coat during the winter, and that time when he was thirteen and he tried to insulate it with duct tape and a ragged old blanket, and how his mom walked in, probably drunk, and watched him cry and walked away again, expressionless.

The moldy ends of loaves of bread that his mother left open on the counter, and that he ate after she went to bed. The maggots growing in boxes of cereal that he stuffed in his mouth before noticing—