“This is your uncle,” his mother had told him when a short, barrel-chested, wholly unfamiliar man answered. Will was close enough, eye level enough, to see the way the man’s mouth had dropped open slightly and briefly before he’d closed it and set his jaw against them both.

“My brother,” she’d added softly, a crack of emotion in her voice.

You have a brother? he’d thought, confused, blurry in his head, too, but still he’d stuck out his hand for the man—his uncle—to shake.

“I’m Will,” he’d said automatically, politely, glad that his own voice had mostly stopped cracking over the last few months since he’d turned fifteen. It came out, to his own ears, sounding more grown-up and unsurprised than he felt inside.

But the man—his uncle, his uncle he’d never heard of—hadn’t taken his hand. Hadn’t looked at him at all. Instead, he’d stared at Will’s mother like she was a ghost, or maybe like she was alive, but back from the dead.

Inside the apartment, which smelled like cigarettes and the same furniture polish his mother used at home, no one had moved to sit down; no one had spoken. His uncle—Donny, his mother had finally supplied, since the man himself had shown no interest in further introductions—stood beside a brown recliner (lumpy but undefined, to Will’s unreliable eyes), his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. His mother had stayed near the door, and so had Will. She’d been waiting, he thought, to be well and truly invited in.

But even Will could see that wasn’t going to happen.

“I won’t do this with your kid here,” Donny had said finally, the first words Will ever heard him say.

Your kid, Will had repeated in his mind. He’d always been a good listener, at least, and he got the message. Maybe this guy Donny was Will’s uncle, but he sure didn’t intend to be any kind of family, and Will tried to tell himself that was fine by him anyway. After all, he was an only child, and up until this moment he’d thought his parents were only children, too. Other kids in his school had grandparents, cousins, big gatherings at the holidays. But the Sterling household, it was a small unit. Just the three of them. Not even a dog or a cat or a goldfish to complicate things.