When he was a kid, he thought he knew what it would mean to be wealthy. He would watch the rain sliding down his bedroom window, splatters of moisture leaking through, the lights of the city dazzling through the lens of thunderstorms, and he had imagined that having money was like that light and the way it shone through cold rain—something stunning and vivid and implausible. Thunder rattled the windows and he wanted to be like that thunder, powerful, something to be noticed, something which couldn’t be denied.

He thought that money would make him happy.

But there was that feeling in him, the feeling he’d had for practically his whole life, that he was incomplete. Money bought him food, and some decent clothes, and his kids got braces, and Meg could work in sports journalism, traveling and working her way up the ranks in a dying industry, and there were always presents under the tree, and he never got cold. Those were all blessings he had never had; to feel anything but gratitude was unfair, selfish. He could raise children who always had enough, and he always had enough, and—

That was happiness, wasn’t it?

Jack closed his eyes and flashed on the stupid, incoherent email he had sent Theo.

He’d been happy, then. In the apartment in Ireland, with hardly anything, but with someone to—

And now he wanted to run away again—he felt trapped by all of the things that he had always coveted. His picture up at Gwynns, and a closet full of (still somehow ill-fitting) suits, polka-dotted ties, respect from dull and important people.

He stood at the double-glazed windows at the top of his office building, no heat or cold or rain coming through, and he felt entirely empty.

A sound from his computer—his email pinged. He crossed to his desk, settled into his chair again, and his heart beat twice in quick succession as he opened a two-word email.

Theo.

He wondered if Theo had learned how to be—he didn’t sound happy either, but it was—

Maybe it was a start.

He had told everyone he was going on a European tour. And he had meant to, but he was...waylaid.

Jack had never been anywhere or done anything. His world was pretty much Baltimore—everyone he knew was from Baltimore, and he’d spent every day and night of his life in Baltimore, and it wasn’t like his mother would have been able to send him someplace—study abroad, vacation, anything—so his experience, despite the four years at Gwynns, was limited.