I asked her major, wondering if she’d given up music altogether, hoping she hadn’t.

Her answer, music education, was a relief, but she lamented the thought of teaching, as if that would prevent her from performing. I couldn’t see the correlation. Woe to anyone who tried to tell Heller he wasn’t doing economics because he was teaching it. They’d get an earful about how he conducted research for respected peer journals, stayed current on global economic events, and participated in influential economic conferences.

I added a stern postscript ordering her to do the worksheet before Friday.

She emailed me back and called me a slave driver.

I closed my laptop and went for a run, but it didn’t lessen the uncontrollable effect of her impertinent little replies. I paced the apartment for half an hour before grabbing my phone and pulling up her number. Shoving all misgivings aside, I sent her a text: Hi. :)

She answered in kind. I asked what she was doing, and commented on her quick disappearance at the end of class. I told her to come by the Starbucks Friday afternoon, when it was usually dead, adding, Americano, on the house?

She agreed to come, and I had a moment of exhilaration followed by the desire to beat myself into a bloody pulp.

‘Why did you just sit there and let me do that?’ I asked Francis.

He supplied a steady feline stare.

‘You could have at least attempted to stop me.’

He licked a paw, ran it over his face, and stared again.

‘Is this how schizophrenia begins? First, talking to a girl as two different guys, and then talking to my cat. This is a new low.’

‘Meee-ow,’ he answered, tucking himself into a circle.

Whenever Charles and Cindy were barbecuing or making fajitas, I didn’t have to ask what time dinner was – I just waited for the smell of grilled meat to permeate my apartment.

I grabbed the pan of brownies I’d made and headed over.

Dinner conversation concerned Cole, who would arrive in a couple of weeks for his first visit home from Duke, only to be stuffed into a car with the rest of us and driven to the coast. If Raymond Maxfield wouldn’t come to Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving would go to him.

‘Cole will be a cranky, stinky a-hole – three hours on a flight and then four hours in the car? Ugh!’ Carlie protested.

‘He’s eighteen,’ Charles said. ‘He’ll sleep.’

‘Good idea. Drug him,’ Carlie said, scooping a corn chip an inch high with guacamole. ‘Please.’ Her appetite had returned and then some after she got over her breakup. During dessert, her parents exchanged a smile when she took a brownie square. ‘Mmmm. These are like sex on a cloud,’ she commented, licking a finger, and her father’s face turned to granite.

‘Carlie Heller,’ Cindy said. ‘You’re going to kill your father with statements like that.’

‘What? Dad, I’m barrelling towards adulthood.’ She spoke while chewing. ‘You’re around college students all day. That’s less than two years away for me! Get real. I can’t be a kid forever.’

Caleb’s eyes swung back and forth between his sister and parents. He hadn’t been the centre of conversation once during the meal. As the baby of the family, that was tantamount to invisibility. ‘Stephen Stafford kissed a snake,’ he said.

‘I hope that’s not a euphemism, because eww,’ Carlie said.

‘What’s a euph–’

‘The snake in your science classroom?’ Cindy asked, focusing on her youngest kid. Caleb nodded. ‘And how did this happen?’

‘Dale Gallagher dared him.’

‘Ah.’ She looked at Charles across the table. ‘Well, I feel very sorry for Stephen Stafford’s parents.’

Caleb frowned. ‘Why? He probably didn’t tell them he kissed a snake.’

‘Still getting mental pictures and trying to eat, thank you very much,’ Carlie mumbled, wrinkling her nose.

‘Also Dale Gallagher had to pay him five bucks to do it.’

‘Then I suppose we can feel sorry for Dale Gallagher’s parents as well,’ Charles said, arching a worried brow at Carlie. ‘If he’s dumb enough to pay someone to kiss a reptile.’

When I’d first moved into the apartment above the Hellers’ garage, I hadn’t known what to expect – from how much interaction I would have with them to what the apartment would look like. No one had lived there since they moved in. They’d only used the space for additional storage. But I figured that whatever it looked like, it would beat sleeping in a pantry.

Carlie ran up to the SUV when Charles and I drove up. She’d been a preemie baby, so she had been small for her age all her life. Next to my eighteen-year-old body, she’d never seemed tinier. Still, she nearly knocked me over when she launched herself at me, as wide-eyed as a little kid on Christmas morning.

‘Landon, you have to come see!’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me along the driveway. After the four-hour drive, I was ready for a bathroom, a meal and a nap, plus I had a carful of shit to unload, but there was no stopping a fully energized Carlie.

Her brothers and parents followed us up the steps, where Carlie presented a key ring with a single key attached. The ring’s logo was that of the university where I would, unbelievably, be an official student in a week’s time. As she bounced on her toes, I unlocked the door and found a sparsely furnished apartment. I hadn’t expected furniture. Or newly painted walls, newly installed blinds, dishes in the cabinets, towels in the bathroom. An entire wall of the bedroom was covered in cork, ready for the drawings I might want to pin to it. Sheets were stacked at the foot of a platform bed.

With effort, I struggled to swallow. I couldn’t turn and look at any of them. I couldn’t speak. It was too much.

I walked to the window and twisted the rod, opening the blinds and flooding the room with light. My bedroom view was treetops – thickly leaved live oaks, and sky. The view from the living room would be the Hellers’ backyard, pool and house. They would be feet away. Steps away.

Charles and all three kids disappeared without my notice, and Cindy moved to stand beside me as I stared sightlessly out the window. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Landon,’ she said, her hand coming to rest on my back. ‘Charles and I are proud of what you’ve done to make this happen for yourself.’

The Hellers were like family to me. They always had been. They always would be. But they were just that – like family. They weren’t really mine.