I’ve been trying to play it cool, but it’s really fucking hard to play it cool when you’re sitting in the front seat of a car with no phone. This neighborhood is so quiet. The spring sunshine filters down through the trees, growing out of a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. Classy. Classy as hell. Even my uncle’s neighborhood doesn’t have this kind of trees. A flash of pink to the right—a jogger. A jogger. She’s beautiful and trim, and her outfit is perfectly coordinated. I purse my lips, trying to find any possible flaw, and fail.

Gio bursts from the front door of the house, running as fast as he can, sprinting for the car.

I could snap in two from the tension. He jumps into the seat and I press backward into mine. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He murmurs the word like a prayer while he wrenches the key in the ignition and the car roars to life. He’s barely looking when he reverses into the street.

“Jesus, Gio, you could have hit—”

The woman jogging on the sidewalk flies straight out of my head. There, on the porch of the little house with its navy-blue shutters, is an older version of Gio. This version of him is more refined, with a certain elegance to the lines of his face. It’s like Gio’s rough beauty, but different enough.

He has a gun in his hands.

It’s pointed at me.

I clap my hands over my mouth as if my scream would be the thing to give us away and drop down in my seat, wiggling low.

He shoots.

The bullet hits the frame of the car with a low ping and a scratch as it digs into the paint. My breath catches in my throat and I stomp my foot uselessly against the floor where the gas pedal would be.

Gio floors it.

The wheels screech on the pavement and there is a vague scent of burning rubber. That’s how fast we’re tearing out of her. Form this low in my seat, all I can see of Gio is his knuckles, white on the steering wheel.

I gasp in a breath, open my mouth to speak, but there are no words.

Control. Control. I wrestle for control. At first, I only get a handle on my breathing. The rest of my body vibrates with nerves, but I start at my feet, pressing them to the floor of the car. Calming breaths. One inch at a time, like my mother taught me, back when I would cry so hard I’d be sick. But what will I do without you? My own broken voice fills my mind, but hard on its heels, I hear my mother, as clearly as if she’s here next to me. Relax, Sia mine. You’ll take it one minute at a time.

It seems like a thousand minutes before Gio speaks.

“You can sit up.”

I breathe down into my toes and relax my legs, then push myself upright into the seat as Gio steers the car onto the freeway on-ramp. The sight of the open road exhausts me, but it’s also a relief.

I watch him for a moment. His jaw is clenched tight, face pale, eyes locked on the road. Anger radiates from him, off his very skin, and fills the car. The radio is back on, more of the top 40 stuff I danced to in the club—was that last night?—and his rage is a stark contrast. “Gio—”

He slams a hand down on the steering wheel, and I startle but manage to hide it. “Fuck.”

What can I say? What can I do? Was it real, what I saw, or was it based on a lie? The only question that comes to mind is one that will give me clarity. “Your own brother?”

“My own brother.” He answers the question I was barely able to ask. I can’t force myself to say the word betrayal. It’s written in his eyes.

The pain in his face squeezes at my heart, and like that, all the time between us falls away. I see him. Gio. The patient kindness of him. The bravery of him. The loyalty of him. He never left my side in school, not until he had to, and underneath the sharp facade of his family, that boy is still there.

Only now, he’s all man.

“Gio,” I say again, pitching my voice low. “If you need to—” I have nothing. I am moneyless, phoneless, IDless, everythingless. I’m wearing Gio’s clothes. “If you need to take me somewhere, I’ll disappear. I can make this easier. I know I can.”

He cuts a glance at me and snorts. “Are you fucking serious, Sia? You’re trying to make me feel better? I’m the reason you’re here at all. I took you—” He clenches his teeth together again. “I took you.” His voice trembles with hurt and rage. “You should hate me. You should kill me.”

“I don’t want that.” He swings the car quickly into the left lane and revs the engine, passing a white minivan driven by a woman with gloriously curly hair.

“What do you want, then?” He sounds on the verge of laughter, the kind of crazy laughter that only happens when everything has gone terribly, horribly wrong. For a while, after my mother died, I was so pissed at her for leaving me. I thought it was the ultimate betrayal. No. What’s happening to Gio is worse. Far worse. And though I’m not responsible at all—though this is not my fault, and I know that—I can’t dismiss the urge I have to soothe him.

By any means necessary.

“I want to be safe,” I admit, because it’s the truth. But there is something else that’s equally true. Something that burns alongside my need for safety. “I want to be with you.”

He glances at me again as he moves back into the right lane, and his eyes are disbelieving. “You do?”

“Yes.” I watch the road. One of us has to pay attention. “I did back in school, and I do now, and I’m willing to forgive you for fucking kidnapping me—” A driver in the left lane tears past us, horn blaring for no apparent reason. “—if you’ll make a plan with me, right now, about what we’re going to do.”

“A plan? What the hell kind of plan?” His grip tightens on the wheel, the sunshine vivid on his face. It’s noon. This day may as well be a year.

“I have an idea,” I tell him. “But you’ll have to trust me.”