Once I finished school, I could have come back home. But I didn’t. I’ve been living with a friend of mine in Hyde Park.

I tell myself that I need a little more privacy for bringing girls home, or staying out as late as I want. But the truth is, I feel a strange kind of wedge between me and the rest of my family. I feel like I’m drifting, in sight of the rest of them, but not on the same boat.

They’re all changing so rapidly, and I am too. But I don’t think we’re changing in the same way.

It’s been three years since we had our last run-in with the Griffin family.

That night changed my life.

It started with a dinner, very like this one, except it was on the rooftop of our family home, while we were all still living there. We saw fireworks breaking over the lake, and we knew the Griffins were holding a birthday party for their youngest daughter.

How different our lives would be if we hadn’t seen those fireworks. If Aida hadn’t perceived them as a sort of challenge, or a call.

I remember the bursts of colored light reflecting in her eyes as she turned to me and whispered, “We should crash the party.”

We snuck onto the Griffins’ estate. Aida stole their great-grandfather’s watch and accidentally lit a fire in their library. Which made Callum Griffin come hunting for us later that night. He trapped Aida and me on the pier. Then his bodyguard smashed my knee.

That was the fracture in time that sent my life shooting off in a completely different direction.

Before that moment, all I cared about was basketball. I played hours and hours every day. It’s hard to even remember how much it consumed me. Everywhere I went, I had a ball with me. I’d practice dribbling and cross-overs in every spare moment. I’d watch old games every night before bed. I read that Kobe Bryant never stopped practicing until he’d made at least 400 baskets a day. I decided I’d sink 500 daily, and I stayed for hours after our regular practices, until the janitors turned off the lights in the gym.

The rhythm and feel of the ball in my hands was burned into my brain. Its pebbled texture was the most familiar thing in the world, and the most familiar sound was sneakers squeaking on hardwood.

It was the one true love of my life. The way I felt about that game was stronger than my interest in girls, or food, or entertainment, or anything else.

When the bodyguard’s boot came down on my knee, and I felt that blinding, sickening burst of pain, I knew my dream was over. Pros come back from injuries. But injured players don’t make pro.

For over a year, I was in denial. I did rehab every single day. I endured surgery, heat packs, cold packs, ultrasound therapy on the scar tissue, electro-stimulation of the surrounding muscles, and countless hours of tedious physiotherapy.