SUMMER HAWKINS HAD known about Quentin’s death for twenty-four hours, but she didn’t allow herself to cry about it until after she’d dropped Dean off at the airport. It felt like an indulgence, weeping over a friend, even a best friend (and Quentin had been Summer’s very best friend), with his husband right beside you, unable to cry or even speak.

Summer had been the first person Dean had called, right after he’d heard the news from the Tarry Ridge police. He’d told her before his sister, before his parents. “I am letting you know first,” he had said. “I know you’re hurting as much as me.”

She wasn’t, of course. How could anyone be hurting as much as Dean? But what she felt over Quentin now was nearly as painful—a mix of sorrow and anger and worst of all, guilt. This was what Summer would never tell Dean: as awful as she felt about Quentin’s suicide, it hadn’t surprised her.

Ever since she’d met him, at a friend’s party during their sophomore year of college, Summer had sensed something off in Quentin Garrison, something broken. It may have been what had drawn her to him in the first place, fixer that she was—that faraway look he’d get when he thought no one was watching him, the way he’d deflect personal questions with jokes or how sometimes, when he’d had a few drinks, he’d get tears in his eyes . . .

Most people didn’t see Quentin as troubled, or even unhappy. They thought he was an overachiever and a bit of a grade grubber, his hand constantly in the air during their creative nonfiction class, always asking overly complicated questions. But Summer knew people. She could see them for who they truly were, and there was so much to Quentin. So much he refused to show.

Senior year, he finally told her. The two of them had been sitting on the floor of her tiny studio apartment just before dawn, stoned out of their minds and talking endlessly as they always did, about politics and philosophy and the hidden meanings behind old Talking Heads songs. And then Quentin had gone quiet. “I want to tell you something,” he had said. “It’s hard for me to say.”

Summer had taken an enormous hit off the bong, her mind racing with crazy imaginings—the sort of unrealistic expectations that embarrassed her now, but had seemed entirely possible back then, when she was a self-absorbed, twenty-one-year-old virgin with an all-consuming crush on her gay best friend. Say it, Summer had thought. Say it, and I will run away with you. But what Quentin had said was this: “My mother hates me.”