“The doctor says if I don’t go . . .”

Rio gulped and his eyes darted around wildly. Anything but look at his mom’s face, with her crooked smile and too-bright eyes.

But then it got worse.

She explained that he was going to stay with his grandmother for four weeks. His father was out of the question because of the new baby, and his paternal grandmother lived in a tiny one-bedroom cottage, so that ruled her out too.

“Four weeks!” he cried, something rushing so fast in his stomach, he felt sick. “But you hardly ever speak to her!”

“That’s because your grandmother and I are two very different people and the last time we saw each other in London . . . well, we disagreed about a few things.”

“Then why are you sending me there?!”

“It’s the best place for you, Rio-cat. The healthiest place. Sometimes you need to put aside your own differences to do the right thing,” she answered tiredly. “Besides, it’s only while I . . . while I get better.”

There was a silence that hung in the air. The kind of silence that comes just before Big Moments. It was, as Rio knew, the worst kind of all.

His mom had always been unpredictable and changeable—sometimes as light and floaty as a flute, and other times as sad and heavy as a clash of drums. Rio had thought all grown-ups were like that—until his father informed him that his mom was different. When he had pressed his father to find out exactly what “different” meant, his dad just said that she wasn’t right in the head. But what did that even mean?

The dark spells often sprang from nowhere, striking at unexpected times and then lingering for days, weeks, and, in the case of the latest patch, months. This time she’d even taken sick leave from the orchestra—something she had never done before. And even though autumn had been full of golden-bronze colors and crisp blue skies, she had spent each day locked inside the apartment, as if she were suddenly afraid of the outside world.

The outside world, as far as Rio could tell, hadn’t changed.

But his mom had.

He never knew quite what to expect when he got home from school. Sometimes she wouldn’t even be dressed, or if she was, she’d be sitting on the sofa with the curtains tightly drawn. Her favorite peacock-colored silk scarf—the one she usually only ever wore for concerts—was often stained with splotches of tea. Lately, there’d been a musty, sour smell in the apartment that, no matter how many windows he opened, never seemed to go away. And he couldn’t even remember the last time she’d cooked a proper dinner.

But to be sent all the way to California? Alone?

He took one last look around him, as if to drink in his surroundings—the bookshelves crammed with the biographies his mom liked to read, the wobbly music stand by the window, the photos on the mantelpiece of the pair of them at the beach on his seventh birthday—and then finally to his mother. And when he did, he realized he barely recognized her. Her face was wild and loose and ever so slightly scary.