Daniel came around the table, one hand planted on his hip, the other buried in his blond hair so that the curls went halo on him. I was high when it all went down . . . so I just thought it was so funny, Dad bursting in with three guys in black. I figured it was his version of an intervention—all comic-book hard-core. But as they put the needle in my arm, he started to scream and that’s when I realized . . . it wasn’t funny.

Daniel’s eyes met hers. I’d never seen him that way before. To me, he was always so aloof and unemotional. It was . . . the reaction I had been looking for all my life, the visceral love I’d been after. See, I was like Mom, not you and him. I wanted more than that chilly disapproval and I got it, only it was too late. . . . He shrugged. In retrospect, I was too needy, and he didn’t know what to do with a son who wasn’t cut from military cloth. Oil and water. I should have handled it differently, but I didn’t.

“And neither did he.”

It’s not anyone’s fault. It just . . . was.

Grier leaned back in her chair, thinking of the way their family had aligned, she and their father on one side, Daniel and their mother on the other.

It wasn’t his fault, her brother said with a kind of stern tone she’d never heard from him before. The way I ended . . . he screamed, Grier . . . and then as I was dying, I heard him say, over and over again, Danny boy . . . my Danny boy—

As Daniel’s voice broke, she was compelled to get up and go to him. Before she knew what she was doing, she put her arms around . . .

Herself.

Please don’t hate him, he said from the far corner, having shifted quick as a blink.

“Please don’t run,” she countered.

I’m sorry. . . . I have to go . . .

He disappeared before her as if he couldn’t hold his emotions in any longer, his despair lingering in the cold spot he left behind.

She stood for a time, staring at the vacant space he’d just occupied. She and her father had been two of a kind, and in their intellectual accord, they’d locked the others out, hadn’t they. Her mother and brother had taken to their addictions while she and her father had been in lockstep with the law and their careers and their external passions.

She’d known it on some level . . . and maybe that had been part of her drive to save Daniel. Her brother’s addiction and her efforts to pull him out of it had been the link they hadn’t found outside of childhood: She had always blamed herself—and for a brief moment tonight, she had blamed her father.