At school Gabe spent lunchtime in the music room, where he fiddled around on the piano enough that the band teacher agreed to give him formal noontime lessons. He picked up drumming and a little bit of bass. Both Castro boys were popular: They were handsome, polite, and made good grades. Freddy was the athlete—football, baseball, water polo—and Gabe the artist. He played at weddings, birthdays, and graduation parties. Junior year, he and some friends formed a band that played gigs up and down Highway 99, from Sacramento to Bakersfield. They once opened for a band that had opened for the Pixies. A guidance counselor who’d grown up in New Jersey suggested Gabe apply for scholarships back East. NYU and Boston College offered him full rides; Claudia’s dad chose NYU because New York seemed like a better place for a musician.

And he was right. The school’s music department had state-of-the-art studio equipment, and by the beginning of his junior year, Gabe had a meeting with Russell Simmons, who’d heard him spinning at a party in the SoHo loft of one of his wealthy classmates. For the next nine months, instead of going to class, Gabe spent his days and nights in a Greenwich Village recording studio, writing and playing and mixing and smoking weed and having the time of his life. By twenty-one Gabe had laid most of the tracks that would become his first hit record. At twenty-two the money started pouring in, and at twenty-four he had a girlfriend with a modeling contract and ancestors who had come over on the Mayflower. By twenty-seven he had two Grammys, his own SoHo loft, and a baby on the way. A town house and another daughter came a few years later; more world tours and nights in the studio and awards ceremonies and now he was a single grandfather at fifty. With Edie up in Poughkeepsie and her mom now living in an apartment in the West Village, Claudia was the only one who sometimes stayed in Gramercy with her dad—and he wasn’t doing well.

Which was why Claudia decided not to call him. She needed someone steady and maybe it made no sense but the steadiest person she’d met in ages was the boy from down the hall with the cross around his neck. So she stayed inside for the next four days while the purple and red faded from her face. Trevor brought her food and they ate together and sometimes they watched something on Netflix. He was easy to talk to, just like her dad.

On Thursday, Ben texted:

will I see you saturday?

are you pissed?

i don’t want to celebrate without you