He didn’t have kids, maybe never would at this rate. He and Lisa had talked about it a lot in the beginning, that first year when they were trying to decide whether to buy a ranch house sitting on a few acres of former prairie land in a sparsely populated subdivision northwest of the city, which Darren had wanted, or a loft in a newly revitalized downtown Houston, close to Lisa’s office and countless bars and restaurants, concert halls and art galleries, and a yoga studio she loved but rarely had time for. Lisa won, and Darren guessed it was fine they didn’t have a scratch of grass to call their own—no place for a kid to learn to ride a bike, let alone a gelding, of which Darren had two, though they resided with Mack—because after Lisa won her first big tort litigation case, talk of having a kid faded away. Darren was not a father, no, but he’d been a nine-year-old boy once, and like Levi King, it had been during a time of significant domestic strife.

That was the year he’d lost his uncle William for the first time, the year his uncle finally married Naomi—after a painfully long engagement—and started a family of his own, the year William and his twin brother, Clayton, stopped speaking to each other. The men had raised Darren after his father died in Vietnam and his mother proved to be less than equipped to look after anything small and needy, and Darren was confused and wrenched to pieces over the brothers’ breakup. Clayton, who’d been in love with Naomi for years, banned his brother from the family home in Camilla, and Darren didn’t see his uncle William for almost a year. It was the first time he’d ever truly felt like a bastard, like a boy without a family, at least not the kind of families he’d seen in movies and picture books: a mom and a dad and a couple of kids. It was just Darren and Clayton all of a sudden, and the house, his entire childhood, actually, felt empty without his beloved uncle William—the man who’d taught him how to fish, how to shoot a twelve-gauge, and how to grow tomatoes as firm and sweet as apples. Darren had always resented Clayton for sending William away, for robbing him of the other father figure in his life. It would be years before he understood the particulars of the love triangle that had destroyed his family, the lack of innocence on the part of both Naomi and William. The facts couldn’t be plainer: William had stolen Clayton’s girl right out from under him.