Hunter laid back in his bed, thinking. He suddenly remembered the sound of breaking glass and cheering. Fishing around in the tangled sheets for his phone, he scanned his texts, but there was nothing from Will. Had they all left together? He dialed Will, but the call went straight to voice mail. He put the phone on his nightstand and, as he rose, noticed his sneakers on the floor at the foot of the bed, wet enough that the balled-up socks inside them appeared to be soaked as well. What exactly had happened last night?

Hunter slipped down a set of back stairs that led to the kitchen, hoping to avoid his stepmother while he went to wake up June and Rosie. The house was old and full of odd passageways and funny turns. It had been pieced together over the last two centuries, each family adding on to the original stone structure until it became a rambling mansion, nestled between a pond and an overgrown orchard. It had character, his father liked to say. It was nothing like the gleaming house clones that Finch Properties built up and down the coast in mazes of cul-de-sacs. Those houses always made Hunter feel off-kilter, each one of them almost the same, but eerily different. A closet where you expected a bathroom, or the kitchen a mirror image of what it should have been.

Hunter shuddered, and then steadied himself. It was just the comedown from the ecstasy, he told himself. All of the dopamine drained from his brain.

He heard the little kids’ voices before he made it down to the kitchen, but it was too late to turn around. They would have already heard him on the creaky steps, and he didn’t want Lindsay to think that he was too scared to face her. Even if he was.

Jack and Grace, four-year-old twins, were eating lunch at the kitchen table, a portable DVD player open in front of them. Lindsay sat across from them, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea and her face a blotchy mess. When the kids heard Hunter come in they looked up at him quickly and then stared back at the screen so hard that Hunter was sure they weren’t paying the least bit of attention to it.

“Hey, uh, sorry about the car,” Hunter said sheepishly.