Chapter 1

Matthew

Sometimes I feel like I remember her. There’s a vague, blurred image in my head, and yet it’s there.

And sometimes I think I drew those memories myself. I learned how back when I was a kid, when I wanted so badly to fill the empty space where a mother should have been with anything at all—even some invented image of a young, kind woman.

She had thick chestnut hair and slender hands that never wore a ring. When I was born, Lucas had just turned three and Christian was six; their mother still hadn’t divorced our father and showed up at the house from time to time, so my brothers barely remembered Jocelyn either. But even they could tell me a lot more than Dad ever did.

Jocelyn Smith. Finding a needle in a haystack would have been easier than finding her. She lived in the Palmer house for less than a year after I was born before she left. And when that happened, Chris swore she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and that she and Dad fought all the time.

Later, all I managed to learn from Dad about my mother was that he’d picked her up near some motel after she was dumped there by a guy named Kurt, whom she’d spent two months traveling around the country with after running away from strict parents. And that trusting her, taking a treacherous snake in and holding it close, had been the biggest mistake of his life.

When I was little, I couldn’t understand why my mother hadn’t taken me with her. Why she hadn’t stolen me as neatly as she’d stolen Dad’s wallet from his pocket, along with all the cash the family had. I grew up in this house. I grew up beside my brothers, but for a long time I never felt like I belonged in the family. I kept waiting for her at the window in the evenings, believing that one day the kind woman with chestnut hair would appear and take me to a home where kids got bedtime stories, warm hugs, and cake.

She was the first person who ever said my name—Matthew. There was no way she didn’t love me!

Dad explained everything after another fight between Lucas and me. I think by then both of them had gotten damn sick of all my waiting. He simply grabbed me by the ear, dragged me halfway through the house, and shoved me in front of a mirror.

Or more exactly, he shoved my nose right up to it and forced me to look at my reflection:

“Because you were born a Palmer, you fucking ungrateful little shit! Look at yourself—who the hell needs you? And you’d better stop sniveling, Matt. If you don’t, I swear I’ll stripe your ass myself with a belt! Enough with those stupid books. I don’t want to hear about that crap again! Dreams and fairy tales were invented by rich people so they could feed stories to idiots like you and lead them around by the nose their whole lives. But I’m not letting anyone make a fool of you! You’re the same as us, and one day you’ll understand that!”

Yes, the same. And Lucas and Chris made sure I got it good and proper—they liked teaching me about life until I learned to hit back and bare my teeth. And little by little, I stopped believing. Stopped waiting.

Yes, I was born a Palmer, and I couldn’t have had any future except the one written into the code of my blood. Sometimes I even tried to get high off the danger surrounding me. But days and weeks passed, and suddenly, after that gray, hopeless present, a morning would come when I woke up as a different person. With an empty ache in my chest and thoughts in my head that had no business being there.

I hated days like that. They broke me worse than the Bluff and ate away my soul with shoots of stupid hope, forcing me to see the world differently. To hope that maybe it was still possible to change everything. That maybe it wasn’t too late.

Change what? My future or my past? My family, every single member of which the police knew by sight? It was ridiculous to think I’d be allowed to become someone else in a place where everyone, while I was growing up, kept saying: “Keep your mouth shut, Matthew, you’re one of us! And you’d better forget what you saw! A van’s coming in from Raleigh tomorrow, get the garage ready, we’re in for a sleepless night…”, “Shut up, Matt! Even if the cops start twisting your balls off with their bare hands, you’d better shove your tongue down your throat and swallow it, or I’ll rip it out by the root myself! You’re a Palmer, and we never run our mouths unless we want trouble…”

Every night like that, when my father and brothers painted or stripped down a stolen car or motorcycle, brought me back to reality better than an ice-cold shower. That reality taught me to handle machines before I even understood why I needed to know. It also taught me to sense cops before their police Buicks braked at our front door, before the radio crackled and the heavy knock came at the door.

In those seconds, there was no chance, no future, only the voice in my head whispering against the back of my neck and making my skin break out in sticky sweat: “Dude, that’s it. You’re completely fucked.”

After nights like that, I knew hope wasn’t worth a damn. Dad was right: I’d been born a quick kid and learned the lessons of childhood well. So every day like that, every day I woke up someone else, always ended the same way for me—with the metallic taste of blood in my mouth and the knowledge of exactly who I was.

School was what kept Dad from introducing me, for now, to the right people—the ones who needed us. Unexpectedly, the town authorities turned out to have a stronger claim on me than he did. That, and my stubbornness, and my place on the Golden Eagles, which he’d never really given a damn about anyway.

Drinking himself under in his garage and letting me do his work for him, Mario Palmer still believed his youngest son was smart enough never to get caught as stupidly as Chris had. While forbidding me to dream, he believed in that himself, even as his second son, Lucas, was already walking the line.

No, Ashley Wilson had nothing to do with my life and couldn’t have anything to do with it. I understood that perfectly. Each of us lived in our own world with its own laws, followed our own rules, and those worlds weren’t supposed to cross. Not in the old parking lot, not at the long-forgotten summer fair. My father could believe whatever he wanted, but even without him I knew that after Lucas, my turn would come too.

They weren’t supposed to, but they crossed because of chance. And if everything had ended with me spending the night in Wilson’s bed, I would have snapped out of it. Forced myself to snap out of it, remembering whose daughter she was. But our meeting on the Bluff slammed our worlds together again and crossed out every rule.

I couldn’t forget Ashley. Not her voice, not the brave touch of her lips against mine, not the words that reached all the way down into my gut: “You… you’re killing me, Palmer!” Not how hard her heart beat under my hand when I kissed her and pulled her close. Not from fear of an unfamiliar place, or of me, but because of what we both felt.