And maybe that made me a bad person. That I could forget the existence of an entire person so integral to our family. I told myself there was no excuse for it. That while it was planned to hide this from him as much as we had, we weren’t trying to be malicious about it. For the longest time, the Kid’s health and well-being had been my top priority, to the point where I sometimes wondered if I was doing too much for him. Instead of letting him figure things out on his own, I shielded him from the worst of it.

I know what you’re thinking. For a time, Dominic Miller wasn’t exactly my favorite person, and so that could have led to the decisions that were made, however subconsciously. I didn’t know exactly what had gone on between the Kid and him, but I had a pretty good idea. Because regardless of how the Kid often insisted he was nothing like me, our stories were weirdly the same. The big difference was that the Kid knew how he felt, whereas I had been blind to most of it.

He never said anything to me, but he had treated Dom the same way I had treated Otter. But the Kid had a level of self-awareness that I would never achieve, so if there’d been the type of feelings there that I thought there were, then Dominic and Stacey must have been a slap in the face, regardless of how inappropriate it would have been for any relationship other than friendship to have happened between the Kid and Dom. He’d been sixteen years old. Dom would have never laid a finger on him, not in that way. I knew that. I knew that. But if he had, I would have torn him to pieces and not felt bad afterward.

Hypocritical, yes.

But I know that.

I wanted the Kid to avoid the mistakes I’d made.

And in doing so, I made things worse.

There had been times I’d let the Kid down. I knew that. He’d been disappointed in me before.

“NOW YOU listen to me,” I said, feeling angrier than I had any right to be. But the Kid was handcuffed in the back of a cop car, and I could see the whites of his eyes. Either he was panicking, on his way to panicking, or had just gotten finished panicking, and I wasn’t thinking rationally. “You haven’t been around for the past four years and—”

“That wasn’t my choice,” Dominic said in that strangely broken voice of his.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I didn’t say it was. Don’t interrupt me again. We clear?”

He nodded at me, though it looked like it cost him.