This party was like a hundred others. The music was loud, the beer was warm, and the partygoers were well on their way to pissed. By the time I stepped out of the back door of the house and into the yard to catch some air—and maybe some silence—I felt like I could have gone back in time to the wild, drunken parties I’d been to when I was eighteen.

Except now I was twenty-five, dead fucking sober, and I’d just gotten out of prison.

I pulled my leather jacket on, since I’d taken it off in the heat of the party inside, and took a breath. A man and a woman were out here, huddled together and talking intimately as the woman smoked a cigarette. When they saw me, they went quiet and the woman put her cigarette out. They went back into the party, both of them giving me a wide berth.

I was used to it. I was over six feet tall, bearded, leather-jacketed, and an ex-con—most people gave me a wide berth. That was fine with me because it left the back deck as all mine. Inhaling the smell of leftover cigarette smoke, I sat on the step and looked out over the yard and the woods beyond, wishing I’d brought a book with me.

The door behind me opened, and Patrick—the homeowner and party-thrower—dropped down on the step next to me. “Brought you a beer,” he said, handing it to me.

“Solo cup?” I asked, looking at the drink in my hand.

He shrugged. “It’s a kegger, man. Tradition.”

I put the cup down on the step next to me.

“You should drink it,” Patrick said. “That’s what the party’s for.”

“It’s hot as piss.”

“Maybe, but it’ll get you wasted.”

“When have you ever seen me wasted?”

He had to think about that. I’d known—been acquainted with was the better term—Patrick since high school, and he’d been to plenty of those wild parties years ago. I was there, but I was never the one getting shitfaced. I was the quiet Riggs brother, the solitary one, whereas my three brothers were the rowdy bad boys.

“Okay, never,” Patrick admitted, “but maybe you should try it. This is your getting out of jail party, after all.”

I shot him an amused look. “You were planning to throw this kegger anyway.”

“Yeah, but when I found out you were back in town, I decided it was in your honor.”

I shook my head. A few weeks ago I’d left the mandatory halfway house in Detroit and moved back to my hometown of Westlake, Michigan. Twenty months—I’d been twenty months in prison, and it felt like it five years. Patrick was probably right that I should cut loose for once in my life, but that probably wasn’t going to happen. The beer really was warm. Besides, if my parole officer caught wind of it I’d be in trouble again. I was supposed to walk the straight and narrow with no exceptions—something people who haven’t been to prison never think about.

Next to me, Patrick drained his own Solo cup. “Okay, I scoped it out for you,” he said. “Janelle or Nika are my picks. I think they’re good to go.”

I looked at him. “What?”

He blinked half-drunkenly at me. “To fuck,” he said clearly. “Either one of them is down to fuck. You just got out of prison, man. Don’t tell me you don’t want some pussy.”

I searched my brain. There had been a few introductions while I was inside at the party, trying to act normal. Janelle was a blonde, pretty except for the exhausted bags under her eyes and the fact that she was too thin. Nika had a big tangle of curly hair and was wearing a black T-shirt with the words emblazoned across her breasts in glitter: NO TIME FOR FUCKBOYZ. I honestly had no idea what that meant and wasn’t sure I would meet her standards.

“I’m good, thanks,” I said.

Patrick nodded. “I get it. You’re a Riggs. Everyone knows you guys. I mean, we always knew your brothers cleaned up like nobody’s business. You probably get more than you can handle.”

This was so off-base that I almost laughed. Not five minutes ago, a woman had crept past me like she thought I would mug her. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I’m just saying.” Patrick held up his hands, not finished giving me his philosophy. “This is a celebration. A guy gets out of prison, he should get maximum pussy. Like an endless string. This is a good party, and the rooms upstairs are empty. At least get your dick sucked. I think Janelle was checking you out.”

She had checked me out. I was intimidating, but I was also noticeable. I was six-three, and I’d done pushups and situps for twenty months to keep myself sane. I wasn’t bulked, but I was hard as a fucking rock, which was not an accident. Still, that didn’t mean I wanted my dick sucked.

Well, I did. Of course I fucking did. I was twenty-five and I wanted to get laid. But not here. Not tonight. Not from her.

Apparently, not ever.

Twenty-five, and it was the story of my fucking life.

“Thanks for the idea, but I’m not going to get that girl to blow me,” I said.

Patrick laughed. “Are you a Riggs or what?”

I knew what he meant. My brothers and I were the notorious bad boys of Westlake. We were born on the wrong side of the tracks, and our mothers had taken off early on. That left us with our father, who had let us run wild. My brothers—Luke, Ryan, and Dex—were good-looking, charismatic in different ways, and pretty irresistible to women. Luke had landed Emily Parker, a cop’s daughter and gorgeous blonde. Ryan was a baseball player who had to beat women off with a stick. And in high school Dex had thrown a party where every girl in attendance was required to be topless. Required. And dozens of them had done it. That party had gone down as one of the rowdiest in Westlake’s history; the cops got called six times.

I’d been part of all that, but I was on the sidelines. I was Jace Riggs, the quiet one, the one who tended to walk the straight and narrow. Until I’d surprised everyone by going to prison for stealing cars.

So yeah, I was a Riggs after all.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to Patrick now. “Don’t you ever want a woman you can talk to?”

His drunk look of bafflement was almost funny. “What?”

“Talk,” I said. “Like two people, instead of a girl and a guy who’s trying to get her to blow him.”

“I try to get every girl to blow me,” Patrick said, as if this were obvious. “Don’t you?”

I rubbed my fingertips over the beard on my jaw. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

Now he was completely lost. “What?”

“Nothing.” I stood up. “Thanks for the party, man. I’ve gotta go.”

It was late August, and the air smelled unbearably sweet after the stink of the house. Twenty months in a cell meant I would never take fresh air for granted again. I let my mind drift as I walked down the drive and the street toward Melcroft Road, where there was a bus stop. I had no car, though Luke said he would get me a junker from the body shop. That sounded good, but in the meantime taking the bus had become second nature.

It was late. I was headed back to the house where I grew up, where Luke lived now. There was a guest house behind the house, which made us sound rich when we were the opposite. The guest house was a leftover from when the house had belonged to someone wealthy a hundred years ago, but right now it was mine, rent-free.

And that all sounded good, except that as always, I was alone.

I should do something about that, but at the moment I didn’t know what.

Well, I thought as the bus pulled up, if I wanted to talk to someone, I’d be doing it tomorrow. Except it wouldn’t be a woman. I had a court-mandated appointment with a counselor, a guy named John White who was supposed to help me adjust to post-prison life. Or something. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I’d already lived at the halfway house until I was allowed to leave, getting random drug checks from my parole officer, even though I’d never had a drug problem. Anything to get the system off my back, I’d do.

Whether John White knew the real truth about me and the time I’d done, the thing that no one else knew, I had no idea. I guessed I’d find out.

There was only one other person on the bus, a young woman in a polyester uniform, coming home from a shift somewhere. I took a seat by the window and unwound my earbuds from my pocket, plugging them into my phone and putting them in my ears. She still got up and moved all the way to the back, as far from me as she could go.

I couldn’t blame her. It was past midnight, we were alone, and I looked like trouble. She couldn’t take chances. She had to be smart.

Still, I turned up the music, looked out the window, and made myself think about nothing at all.