One terrible vice seemed to lead indirectly into another. The drinking and the cheating and the fighting weren’t enough. To win my mother’s affections, to keep her interest, my father would spend outrageously, generating immense debt in pursuit of pleasure. Anything to keep her happy, anything to use as a balm upon the festering wound of dysfunction.

By this point, I was already attending St. John’s as an elementary school student, and when I had holidays, I was with my grandmother. We would travel anywhere we could, tour the Louvre, sunbathe in Fiji, safari in South Africa. Their neglect was really a kindness at the end of the day, she’s quick to remind me. Allowing my grandmother to step in and raise me when they so clearly weren’t up to the task themselves might have been the least selfish thing either of them ever did, and quite frankly, at the time, I didn’t realize anything was amiss, not when I was really young. I thought it was normal to be away from my parents most of the time. Most kids at St. John’s saw their family sparingly at best. Busy people leading busy lives seemed to be the norm within our elite boarding school world.

Things might have continued on like that forever. The endless cycle of madness would have endured had my mother not died in a car crash, an accident caused by one of her lovers racing through a red light.

After her death, my father hit rock bottom, fell into a drunken chasm and never found his way out. The end for him came from the barrel of a gun.

I was twelve years old when they died.

I can’t stand to think about them.

In fact, I try not to, but my grandmother brings them up every now and then as a cautionary reminder. The last time she spoke of them, she took me by the chin and tilted my face so my eyes captured the light streaming in through the windows.

“Your mother was a beauty.” My grandmother sighed. “And you have too much of her in you.”

Chapter Twelve

Emmett

What do I remember most about Lainey Davenport? Her eyes. Everyone back at St. John’s was obsessed with them. They called them haunted and scary because they feared their beauty, feared her. She was cunning, or better yet, astute, like she could strike to the very soul of someone if she paid close enough attention to them. She used to be quiet, shy, young; she seems to be none of those things now. Younger than me still, yes, but a woman, so different than the last time I saw her at St. John’s.

It’s been a week since the gallery show, and I’ve pulled up the Morgan Fine Art Gallery website more than once. It’s muscle memory, typing in the URL, clicking the About page, then Staff. Her professional photo is in black and white and doesn’t do her justice. Her pale green eyes don’t pop like I want them to.