I balanced the pie tin across my knees, shoveling forkfuls of apple pie into my mouth. Rachel was going to kill me for stealing her dessert, but I’d been desperate. And starving. Mostly desperate though.

I stretched forward to reach my glass of milk and took a long sip. Cold and crisp, it slid down my throat, but it did nothing to ease the gnawing in my stomach. The feeling wasn’t at all food related. But if pie, the answer to life’s biggest problems, couldn’t touch this issue I was in a shitload of trouble.

Died. Dani almost died. She’d been shot. In fucking Syracuse. Not even the length of one damn TMZ episode since I’d last seen her. Surely, we would have heard about a student getting shot at our college, wouldn’t we? I wracked my brain, but I knew for a fact we’d never heard that on the news. And if it didn’t make the news, what did that mean? What did it all mean?

I glanced down at my full fork, overloaded with cinnamon apples, and let it drop back in the pan. Shoving it onto the dresser, I dropped my head in my hands and threaded my fingers through my hair.

Across the bedspread my phone started to ring. It’d been doing that nearly non-stop since this morning, but I had to get through the weekend and get home before I could get the damn number changed.

I scooped up the phone, prepared to shut it off, when I realized that, this time, I actually knew the caller. “Evening, Daph. What can I do for you?”

No hello, just a “You still haven’t talked to Mom.”

“Umm . . .” I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d completely forgotten whatever conversation I was supposed to have with her. Typically, I was an A+ big brother, but this whole Dani situation was completely pulling my focus.

“About Darlene.”

The lightbulb didn’t come on. I grimaced.

“This summer, me spending a month with Darlene. You said you’d talk to Mom, convince her it was a good idea.” Exasperation dripped from every word.

Oh, right. Honestly, I wasn’t sure sending my little sister off to spend an entire month with my middle sister really was a good idea. Which was probably why I’d scooted the favor off my mental to-do list. Darlene and Daph were like me in that they were both creatively inclined. But where Darlene was a painter, a wanderlusting hippie at heart, Daph was more like my type A oldest sister, Lilah. Except where Lilah had headed for law, Daphne was an extraordinary cellist.

“Gavin,” she groaned. “It’s just one month. A timeout before I go to college. You remember, right? That I got into the best music program in the entire country? The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music? I need a break.” She huffed. “I know what you’re thinking—that I’ll die of the plague from Darlene’s biohazard apartment, or I’ll starve to death because she only remembers to restock the fridge once a month. But I just want to go and chill out, visit the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, see a few art galleries, go to the opera, sit on the beach. I promise I have no ulterior motives. No machinations of smoking up or getting completely wasted or anything like that. So please, please just talk to Mom. I’m almost out of time to convince her.”

I massaged my forehead. While I didn’t doubt Daphne was responsible to the extreme, sending her to the other side of the country for an entire month with absolutely no supervision still gave me a substantial flicker of anxiety. Then again, she’d be going to college at the end of the summer and if she did half the things I did in college—I violently shook that thought right out of my head. No, nope, no way. In my mind she would always be the little kid I had tea parties with, definitely not anything like me in college.

“Fine,” I said, giving in. “I will talk to Mom. On one condition.”

“Anything.” Her answer was so immediate I could practically see her bouncing up and down in excitement.

“You have to promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.” I sucked in a breath. “Or crazy. Nothing crazy or stupid or—”

“Gav, I never even went to the shitty high school keggers we have.”

“Exactly. This could be just the opportunity you need to have a rebellious phase.”

“Rebellion is switching to an electric cello.”

“If you did that I could probably work you into one of our tracks.”

There was a long pause. “Stop trying to draw me over to the dark side.”

“But we have lyrics.” I grinned, standing to stretch.

“Which only means you lack the sophistication to express yourself through your music alone,” she said, haughtily.

“Classicist snob.”

“Oh, you know it.” She laughed. “So, you’ll talk to her?”

I rolled my eyes. “I will talk to her.”

“Awesome!” She heaved out a deep breath. “I’d say you’re the best, but you’ve lost the necessary points to be classified in that particular range. Minus twenty-five points for managing to call back Lilah about her morbid obsessions, but failing to speak to Mom as requested.”

“Harsh.” I winced as I strode over to my suitcase and riffled through it for a T-shirt. “Will points be restored after the completion of my assigned task?”

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

I flipped over to speakerphone and tossed the phone on the mattress so I could pull my shirt over my head. A quick knock-knock-knock sounded on my door, sounding urgent in its rapid succession. “Alright, Daph, I’ve gotta run.” I snatched up my phone. “Before I do, just a heads up I’m getting a new number.”

“Again? How do people keep getting your number?”

“My guess? Valerie’s scribbling it in random bathrooms across the world.” Somehow Val had an even worse case of wanderlust than Darlene and was frequently found tromping up and down some mountain or another.

Daphne snorted. “Somehow I doubt you guys are that popular in Mongolia.”

I frowned. “Mongolia, I thought she was in Nepal?”

“That was three weeks ago. She’s on to Mount Khuiten.”

Another set of knock-knock-knocks reverberated around the room, louder and more insistent this time. “Shit, I’ve gotta run. If you hear from her again tell her I say hi.”

“Will do.”

I dropped my phone into my pocket. Right now it was more a seven-hundred-dollar paperweight than anything else, but in case of an emergency I wanted to have it on me. Four quick strides had me at the door, and I opened it to find Ian on the other side, his hand covering his eyes. He peeked through two fingers. “Are you decent?”

I snorted. “I’m not sure that word can ever be used to describe me.”

His gaze dropped a little and he tensed. “Just trying to make sure little Gavin and I don’t have another . . . encounter.”

“Dude, that was one time.” I made a face. Like he’d never seen another guy’s junk before. I answer the door one time without clothes on, and I’d never heard the end of it. “And the next time you call him little I will end you.”

“Noted.” He tipped his chin toward the second floor landing. “You need to see this.”

I closed the door behind me before following in his footsteps. At the end of the hall, Ben leaned against the railing, gaze pointed downward. Ian took the spot next to him and I squeezed into the remainder between Ian and the wall.

Laughter reached my ears first, and it took me a good ten seconds to find where it was coming from. The living room was empty, but the kitchen. I blinked, waiting for what I was seeing to come into focus. Surely, what I was looking at was a trick of my imagination. That couldn’t be Dani down there, in the midst of the other girls, laughing like she didn’t have a care in the world when only an hour ago she’d practically dismantled my heart saying that me hating her was more bearable than me loving her.

Watching them together made my chest tighten like somehow I had too much oxygen and not enough at the same exact time. My heart wanted to be happy, it practically threw a party at the sight of them all together, but my head knew what my heart wouldn’t acknowledge: the image before me was nothing more than a handful of moments strung together that would disappear in the blink of an eye. I forced out a laugh. “Is that Bianca in the kitchen?”

Ian whacked me in the back of the head. “Shut your mouth.”

“It is a little concerning,” Ben said, giving Ian some side-eye. “There are eight of us and not nearly enough bathrooms to go around.”

Ian presented Ben with his middle finger, then turned back to me. “You give Dani a pep talk after she came back from the beach?”

“Hardly.” I pinched my lips together to stop myself from saying any more. As much as I wanted to get this fucking weight off my chest and finally be able to breathe again, I knew that spilling the horrific truth Dani laid bare for me this afternoon would be a terrible mistake.

My gaze was glued to Dani, just waiting to catch a hint of discomfort at her situation. Waiting to swoop in and rescue her. But, apparently, any type of rescue was unnecessary. She fawned over Juliet’s engagement ring, whispered conspiratorially with Rachel, and quickly diced the handful of tomatoes Bianca had massacred on the cutting board. From where I was standing I’d never have guessed the four of them hadn’t known each other for years.

Rachel cleared her throat. “You know we can see you, right?”

All four of them glanced our way.

“Busted,” Ian whispered.