What I don’t expect is my uncle, sitting in Ethan’s usual chair, looking like pale death with burning black eyes. His tweed flat cap sits on his head, a small paper bag on his lap. Ethan sits across from him, holding Wilson, while Caesar and Frankie sit on the couch.

“Uncle Gavin?” I take another step into the house, dropping my duffel to the floor.

“Susannah,” he says. His voice sounds like someone took sandpaper to his vocal cords, but it’s his voice, familiar, in control. “Come have a seat.”

“How are you out of the hospital?”

“Signed myself out.”

On the couch Frankie and Caesar are looking back over their shoulders at me. “You drove him here?” I ask them.

Frankie nods. “He asked to come.”

“More like he told us to bring him here,” Caesar says, and Frankie shrugs, conceding the point.

I roll my eyes at my uncle. “For fuck’s sake, you just had open-heart surgery.”

“Language,” Uncle Gavin says.

I literally bite my tongue and walk around the couch to sit on the floor, facing everyone. Wilson leaps off Ethan’s lap and runs over to me, licks my hand, then rolls on his back, the belly slut. I rub his belly. “So what’s the emergency?” I ask Uncle Gavin.

“Needed to see you,” he says. “All of you.”

“What happened?”

My uncle tilts his head slightly as if to get a better view of me. “You did.”

I take in the room. Ethan looks guilty. Frankie has closed his eyes, exhausted as usual. Caesar meets my gaze with something like pity. Wilson thumps his little tail on the floor, the only one in the room who is happy. “How did I happen this time?” I say evenly, but I feel my head beginning to buzz.

Uncle Gavin keeps his burning eyes fixed on me. “I wanted you to stop a gang war. Instead, you escalated one.”

“It was escalating all on its own. I just got us to the end a little faster.”

Uncle Gavin shifts in his chair, the paper bag on his lap crinkling. “With a shootout in a warehouse. And then a gas explosion in Doraville where two police officers died.”

“Which I tried to stop,” I say between clenched teeth. “And I sent the feds to the Sureños’ safe house in Lawrenceville.”

“I gave you Tane Kamaka,” Uncle Gavin says with all the subtlety of a thrown grenade. “And you lost him.”