“Given the state of this room,” she walked farther in, hitching up her slacks to avoid shards of pottery, “I think you need it, even if you don’t want it.”

“Mom.” He slumped, covered his eyes, tried not to cry. “I just need to be angry, all right?”

“Theo, what—”

“Just get out.”

She gave him a long, considering look, and then left. Even though he’d sent her away, he felt that old pain. No one ever fucking stayed.

He picked up a glass paperweight, red and orange swirling through it like fire. It seemed fitting—he drew it back and hurled it at the wall, leaving a dent in the paneling.

If only he could be destroyed so easily. But he just kept on fucking living.

It was cold in the house, too cold, and he remembered what it was like, back then, when the police were trampling through, dismantling his life—and before that, with his father still here, the sapphire-and-diamond Gwynns class ring leaving an imprint on Theo’s cheek, before his mother said, “Not his face, Alex—please.” His closet and all of those books full of fairy tales and the constant, unending fear permeating the air like a foul perfume.

Maybe he’d never left there. Maybe he carried that putrid decay in him. Maybe it came from him, rot arising from his very flesh.

“Fuck, fucking Gardner.” He picked up something else—a sterling silver candlestick—and threw it, relishing the clang. “Why did I—how could he—fuck!”

He took a drag from his cigarette, whirled drunkenly, glared with swollen eyes at his father’s curtained portrait. “You were right after all, Father. So fucking weak.”

The air seemed to vibrate with his anger, and that was a familiar feeling, so like the first time that Jack left, when every second was full of this, the disappointment and the hatred of everything he had ever been. He stared up at the painting, eyes wide.

He was raving.

“How did you know? How could you tell that your precious, pathetic, only child would be,” he gestured wildly at himself, “Like this? Useless, idiotic—never good enough—a fucking catamite to Jack fucking Gardner—”

“Theo!” A strident, terrified voice from behind him. He turned, saw Genni’s face, and all of that energy in the air pulsed and then burst like rotten fruit as he fell to the ground.

“Gen...”

He was suddenly, blissfully numb.

He folded in on himself, knees propped up, head dropped, the bottle dangling from his hand. “What are you doing here?”

She tiptoed her way into the room on scandalously high heels and stared down at him, stern but not cruel. “Oddly enough, I’m here for poker night, which we planned a week ago. I heard ranting and your mother—looking supremely shaken, by the way—sent me in.”

He laughed. “Of course. Didn’t want to deal with me herself.”