He looked almost pained, squinting out over the soft hills. “I . . . respect my family. What my ancestors did. But their legacy is dead now. My mom stays here and tries to keep everything exactly the same as it always has been. But that’s like . . . it’s like if you worked at a factory, and one day it stopped making things, but you still showed up for work every day. That’s how my mom is. There’s nothing left here. It’s all history. There’s no future.”

“But how . . .” I had to tread lightly. “How can you guys afford to stay here?”

“Oh,” he said. “There are investments . . . my mom’s really smart with money, actually. And she’s pretty frugal. We could stay here indefinitely, even with more staff. But I don’t care about that. I don’t want to spend my life babysitting the family fortune.”

“What do you want to do?”

He ducked his head a little, shrugging his shoulders. “Play piano, if I could.”

I sat up. “Oh, you could. You’re so talented. The house is fine, but it’s . . .”

“What?” he asked, looking at me carefully. “You don’t like it?”

I looked out at the breathtaking view. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “But I don’t feel like myself here. Not that I even know who I am anymore, but . . . whoever I am here, it’s not quite right.”

“It’ll be better when the school year starts,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’ll make friends and stuff. Mom can’t lock you away when you have people wanting to hang out.”

“I hope so. Anyway—I don’t mean to complain. Your parents have been really nice to me.” I couldn’t help veering off topic. “I was so surprised to see you playing before. I can’t believe I didn’t know.”

“What did you think I was doing all day?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think I do all day?”

He leaned back in his chair and looked up into the interlaced branches of the tree overhead. “Well, you come down to breakfast and then you go upstairs and help Agatha. You go out and work in the garden, but you’re always clean at lunch, so I assume you shower and get dressed before eating. In the afternoon, you take my sister upstairs and read. Before dinner, you always ask Mom if she needs help with anything, which she never does. Then you go to the library.”

I stared at him.

He gave me a smirk. “And you thought I sat in my room and stared at my lacrosse trophies all day.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “I should have known you contained hidden depths.”

“They’re so hidden and so deep that most people assume I’m a dumb jock,” he said. “And they’re basically right.”