Chapter Three

Margaret Daugherty—Meg—was the youngest in her family, with two older brothers (one who went on to be a doctor, and the other an architect, because everyone in her family was successful) and a very loving mother and father. Her hair was a vibrant auburn, she had about a million freckles sprinkled over her silky skin, and her figure was lean and toned from field hockey, and Jack had loved her impossibly since he was seven years old.

They met at the pool in Bolton Hill, their neighborhood of Victorian row homes and a few shabby apartments, art students and old ladies with perfectly groomed poodles. Meg wore a sharp red swimsuit and drank chilled cans of grape soda, lips stained purple, and she caught him sneaking in through the chain link fence behind the playground on the hottest days of summer. Meg was—she was his first real friend, sort of, and her family had that quality that normal people had, maybe, which meant caring and feeding and supporting. Meg always had a packed lunch with a salted butter and strawberry jam sandwich. After she met Jack, she started bringing two.

It was Meg’s mom—curvy, her brown skin lined from too many afternoons out on a boat at the Eastern shore, thick red-black hair—who told Jack about the scholarships available at Gwynns Academy. And it was her dad who helped him fill out forms. He rolled up his shirtsleeves, exposing his pale Irish skin, loosened his tie, and coached Jack through the essays, the interviews. He loved them both. It felt like they loved him back.

He spent so many summers there, with Meg, at the pool or at her house, and cool spring afternoons with juice boxes and crackers in front of her TV, and Christmas mornings at their kitchen table when the wind was just too damned cold and he had to be—he wanted to be with them. With all the Daughertys. Maybe as a Daugherty, for those few hours.

His mom cracked a joke once. “Seems like you like them better than you like me,” and she must have thought that was funny, because she laughed, her crooked teeth glinting and a brown bottle in her hand.

And he laughed at the joke too, though it wasn’t funny at all, and he pulled his coat on and walked over to their row house on Bolton Street and...played pretend, for a little while.

And that was okay, wasn’t it?

Meg went to a private primary school while Jack went to the local public school, and she was always destined to be a Gwynns girl—she was fierce and smart and stubborn, and she played field hockey like somebody had talked bad about her mother. She was absolutely wonderful. When he was little he knew that, someday, she was going to rule the world.