“He’s really good,” Nadia says. “My friend from college, Kyle, is a pianist. He was offered a scholarship to some fancy East Coast conservatory, but he turned it down to study sociology at UNC, mainly so he could be with Tanner. There was an old upright in the lounge of my dorm, and we’d hang out there and do homework, and he’d always be at that out-of-tune piano, playing these wildly difficult jazz pieces, just half-assing them while talking to us, this improvisational stuff only a small handful of people in the world can play.”

“He didn’t do anything with it?” I ask.

“What, with piano?” She shrugs. “I don’t think so. He graduated with a degree in sociology and he and Tanner moved to LA. I think he just loved playing. He probably found a little jazz bar to play in, something like that.” Her eyes flick over me. “I have a question. You don’t have to answer it.”

I nod. “Okay.”

“It sounds like you had a complicated relationship with your dad. Like, you lived out in the wilderness and didn’t go to school. Basically, you didn’t have a childhood. And I can see how you might end up feeling a little bitter about that. But yet, you said you learned to play the guitar to connect with him.”

I sit back, sigh. “Yeah, you had it right—it’s complicated. I don’t know if bitter is the right word. He was a combat veteran. He rarely talked about it, but he’d have these awful nightmares. He’d wake up screaming, thrashing, yelling names. Again, I don’t know for sure, but I think he was a POW, too. It would explain why he couldn’t be indoors for more than a few hours at a time. I think I understood this about him from a very young age, that he had…demons, I guess, that he was wrestling with. Not something for a kid to have to know about his dad, but…” I shrug. “So, no, I didn’t have a normal childhood. I spent more time learning how to track a rabbit or a deer than doing algebra or chemistry, more time learning how to build a shelter with nothing but a hatchet than reading, like, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

“Wait, when you say track a rabbit…”

I laugh. “I mean, like, track it. Find its footprints and figure out where it went, where it is, and how to kill it.”

“You can’t track a rabbit. They barely even leave footprints.”

“But they’re predictable. You snare them, more than you’d actually hunt them.”

“What does that mean?”

“Figure out where it’s likely to routinely go, and set a trap. They walk through it, trigger the snare, and it catches them. The most effective ones break their necks pretty much instantly.”

“Poor little rabbit.”