Penny was so sensitive that her happiness always seemed precarious. She was easily thrown off course, so vulnerable to illness and injury and heartbreak. Even though my skiing took up no small amount of my family’s time and resources—something I didn’t fully appreciate until much later—I was the easier child in many ways. I was simple: I just wanted to ski. There was a burgeoning chaos to Penny, a deep unpredictability.

Despite the brief, strange foray into religion, I talked to Penny whenever I could that year: she and Emily were the only ones I could talk to about Luke. I didn’t dare share it with any of my ski friends while it was this nascent.

It seemed simple at first. Luke and I already spent so much time together; now we would just do so as a couple. Nothing definitive had been said, but we’d kissed passionately that first night in the hot tub. We’d moved inside after a while and into bed, where hands had wandered, and we eventually fell asleep exhausted by our own churning, circling desires.

Luke and I had been friends since we were five; if he was going to cross that Rubicon with me, it must mean he wanted to be with me, right? It wasn’t as though he had any trouble getting girls. Despite spending all my time with boys, there were many things about their inner lives I didn’t understand: in this case, the gulf between their immediate desires and any thought of the future.

One morning, shortly after everyone had returned from Nagano, we overslept, and I woke in a panic that we’d be found out.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered, laughing and tossing Luke’s swim trunks at him. He caught them and pulled me in for a quick kiss.

“The wine bottle!” he said with a mock horrified face—we’d left an empty one by the fireplace—and winked at me as he crept out the door to hide the evidence.

I wasn’t really worried about being blamed if Tad did find it. Luke was the designated troublemaker in the household. Tad traveled frequently and had to know Luke brought girls around; this definitely wasn’t his first foray into his father’s wine cellar. The only time I’d really seen Tad get angry was when he’d busted Luke with cocaine; drugs were different—drugs showed up on tests. I also knew, though, that the rules were different for me. However much Tad talked about my being family, I wasn’t.

As I was coming down the hallway, I heard Luke nearly collide with Blair in the kitchen.

“Hey, man,” Blair said.

“Oh hey, bro.” I could practically hear his nervous heartbeat.

“What were you doing last night? You were gone when I came in.”