“There were two things I wanted when I was younger,” he said harshly. “I wanted to be rich and I wanted to be out from under their reign of terror.”

“How did they die?” Eddie asked quietly, like he knew this was tough stuff.

“After I…did what I did up there in my room, I just went about normal life, you know? School—well, kind of school, because I skipped out a lot. I never thought it worked, and then I didn’t really think about it all. It wasn’t until it dawned on me that I hadn’t collapsed in a full week that I started to wonder if I might have fixed what was wrong with me.” Vin went over to look out at the view, but instead ended up staring down at a stain on the carpet. It had been made by the broken bourbon bottle, and the dark round mark was the kind of thing no rug cleaner was going to get out. “I remember coming home from working my father’s shift, which I used to do when he was too fucking drunk to stand. It was about midnight. I put my hand on the doorknob and I glanced up at the full moon and I was psyched as I counted all the days that had passed. I was like, Huh, you don’t suppose I’m okay now? And then I walked into the house and found the two of them covered with blood at the bottom of the stairs. They were both gone—and it had probably happened because one of them had pushed the other and gotten pulled along.”

“You are not the problem here,” Eddie interjected.

Vin braced his palms on the window and dropped his head. “Fuck me.”

For no good reason, and probably because it was the only thing that could make him feel worse than he did at the moment, he thought of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. A specific one. The only one that had been made for him by his father.

The two of them had come home from a job late and there had been no dinner on the table. Which made sense, because the only person who could have made it was passed out on the couch with a cigarette having burned to ash in her hand.

His father had headed for the beer in the fridge, but had broken with tradition by taking out the bread and the jam and the peanut butter on the way there. He’d lit a cigarette, laid out four slices, hit the strawberry and then the Jif. After grabbing a Miller, he’d tossed one of the sandwiches at Vin and walked out of the kitchen.

There had been black fingerprints on the white bread because his father hadn’t washed his hands.

Vin had thrown the sandwich in the trash, used the sink and the soap, and made himself a clean one.