You’d think the Riggs men would be big drinkers, considering our upbringing. Our mothers bailed early—Ryan had a different mother than Dex, Luke, and me—and left us alone to grow up however we could. Predictably, we ran wild. We didn’t follow very many rules growing up, but we ended up with surprisingly few vices. Sure, Dex knew a weed dealer on every block and had the alcohol tolerance of a solid slab of iron—he could do shots one by one until his eyes got a little unfocused, and then he’d fall into a peaceful sleep. But Ryan was an athlete, and now he was raising a seven-year-old son, so he didn’t drink, and Luke only had the occasional beer.

As for me, my endlessly ticking brain never let me get truly fucked up. Why are you doing this? Is this the right thing? Is it making you happy? By the time I’d talked myself into getting hammered, I’d usually exhausted myself.

Tonight, I wanted to get wrecked.

Sitting and staring at nothing on a barstool sounded boring, so I took my beer to the pool room in the back of the Guardhouse and challenged all comers. I learned pool at thirteen, and I was fucking good at it. The lines and angles all made sense in my head. A pool shark once told me that to be good at pool was the sign of a wasted youth, and he was right. I’d gone to school, and I found it easy, but teachers hated me. After the fourth or fifth time a teacher assumed I was cheating when I got good marks, I gave up trying. I went to school occasionally, and the rest of the time I read books or played pool.

I am trying to figure out why a man who is intelligent and sensitive and kind would steal cars and fuck up his life.

A guy I vaguely recognized from high school challenged me with thirty bucks on the line; I beat him easily. Then I beat him two out of three. Next up was John Bowmer, well-known Westlake dart champion and barfly. At thirty, John’s teeth were cigarette yellow and he’d had at least one divorce. His pool skills were not equal to his dart skills, so I beat him for twenty bucks and sent him back to the bar.

I was now eighty bucks richer and on my third beer. I was prickly and pissed off after that session with Tara Montgomery. I was mad at myself and at her, but mostly at me. Her words hovered in my brain, cutting like razor blades. I am trying to figure out why a man who is intelligent and sensitive and kind would steal cars and fuck up his life. I feel sorry for whoever gets you next. I took another deep swallow of beer.

The Guardhouse was popular, and it was busy, so I got more contestants. There were even women here, a few of them eyeing me. Fuck. Twenty months in jail. If I could get out of my own head long enough, maybe it was time.

I feel sorry for whoever gets you next.

“Riggs.” I knew that voice. I turned to see Derek Payton, who had been in the same grade as me in high school. We Riggs boys were from the wrong side of the tracks in Westlake—literally, Westlake had railroad tracks with a wrong side and a right side—so we were out of place at Westlake High. Derek had looked down his nose at me, just like everyone else. What made it extra annoying was that I happened to know Derek had a side business selling meth, so he wasn’t really any better than me. I knew too many people’s dirty secrets in this fucking town.

Still, it would be satisfying to beat Derek, so I said, “Derek. You up for a challenge?”

Derek’s gaze flicked down to my cue, then back up. “Shooting pool, huh? I see you’ve been real productive since you got out. Sounds like something your brother Dex would do.”

“Dex sucks at pool.” Dex was good, actually, but I was better.

Derek gave me a smile that had no humor in it, and I remembered the time we’d gotten into a fistfight in tenth grade. I won. Maybe he hadn’t gotten over it. “You’re the brother that ended up in jail,” he said. “Funny.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Lots of time to read your weird-ass books in there, I guess,” Derek said. “Just don’t bend over to get the soap, right?”

Anger flared up my throat, and I wanted to break my pool cue over his head. Not because anything had happened to me in prison—it hadn’t—but because he was so fucking smug. The thing about hitting rock bottom, I’d learned, is that it can happen to anyone. Fucking anyone. It didn’t matter who you were, or how good you were, or what side of the tracks you came from, or how superior you were. Anyone could end up where I was right now.

Then again, I’d made some choices, hadn’t I?

I opened my mouth, probably to say something stupid, and then I stopped. Because behind Derek’s shoulder, the door to the bar opened and Tara Montgomery walked in.

She had changed out of her work clothes. She wore jeans on her slim legs and a white T-shirt under a light summer cardigan of navy blue. Her long brown hair was down, soft over her shoulders and down her back. Flip-flops were on her feet, and I could see her bare toes beneath the hem of her jeans. Her toenails were painted dark purple.

Every guy in the bar noticed her one by one as she spotted me and crossed the room. I couldn’t do anything but stare—I was too shocked at the sight of her. Why was she here? At the Guardhouse? Looking for me?

Derek noticed her at the last minute. He turned around and his eyebrows went up. Tara barely spared him a glance.

“Jace,” she said to me in her blunt way, “can we talk?”

She didn’t even have makeup on, and she was fucking beautiful. Derek noticed. “Hi there,” he said, butting in. “You Jace’s girlfriend? You don’t seem like his type.”

Tara turned to him, unimpressed. “What type is that?” She shook her head. “You know what? Don’t answer.” She turned back to me. “Well?”

I felt myself smiling. She’d actually come looking for me; she must have. Even if she’d come to chew me out, I was still happy to see her. “You want to play pool?” I asked her.

She looked me up and down—all the way up and down, and I realized we weren’t in session anymore. “No,” she said. “I want to get out of here. Is your tab paid up?”

“Yes,” I said.

She took the pool cue from my hand and put it back on the rack. “Honey, let’s go.”

What the hell could I do? I was three beers in, and she had those jeans on, and she’d said Honey, let’s go. I followed her through the bar and out the door.

“Impressive,” I said to her when we got outside and stood on the street, “but you shouldn’t go into places like that. All of those guys were staring at you.”

“Maybe I like pool,” Tara said.

I slid my hands into my back pockets and looked at her. “You hate pool,” I said, taking a guess.

Her lips pressed into a line, and I knew I was right. I smiled again, and she looked at me closely. “Are you drunk?” she asked.

“Three beers,” I confessed. “I feel pretty good, and I won a hundred and twenty bucks. Are you going to tell my PO?”

She shook her head. “I’m not your counselor anymore, Jace.”

“What does that mean? I thought I was going to have to go to sessions until I’m ninety.”

“Yeah, that.” She bit her lip. “I feel bad about that. Where can we talk?”

My place was out of the question, and so was hers, wherever it was. We were too combustible right now; the air practically smelled like sulfur. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.

We walked down the sidewalk toward the park. It was dark out, getting late, the air warm as a breath, the wind hushing in the trees. The peak heat of summer was gone, and now we had the sweet-smelling bittersweet feel of September coming. In my bedroom, in the guest house, I kept my windows open every night because part of me couldn’t stand being parted from the fresh air.

The park was dark and quiet, private. We took the main path toward the center, and then Tara dropped onto a park bench. I sat beside her, sprawling my legs out, and waited for her to say what she had come to say.

“Okay.” She squared her shoulders. “First, I wrote the report on you and sent it to the judge. I gave you a clean bill of mental health. I told him you are adjusting just fine.”

I tilted my head and looked at her. “What? Why did you do that?”

She didn’t look at me; she looked straight ahead, so I was free to stare at her perfect profile in the dim light. “Well, you are in good mental health,” she said logically. “Also, I was a jerk in session and I owed you that.”

“No,” I said. “You were a jerk because I was a jerk first. I call dibs.”

“Jace,” she said. She sighed, shook her head, and glanced at me. “You deserved better.”

That was when I figured it out. Why she’d sought me out, why she’d come to the Guardhouse, why we were sitting in the park right now. Why she was saying sorry. It wasn’t because of me. It never had been.

“Shit,” I said to her. “They told you.”