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No one to tell me I did a good job on a tough math test.

Or proofread my essay or practice my speech or help me learn how to throw a ball.

That all had to come from me.

I had to teach myself, to come up with the systems, to white-knuckle my way through until I was competent enough to succeed.

I wasn’t totally alone.

Teachers helped me. Coaches and counselors at school did too. Even my boss at the fast food joint I worked at in high school, the one that left me smelling like fryer oil, put more time into me than my family did.

Eventually, though, I learned to be grateful for Conrad (and maternal, while I had it) disinterest.

Because when I sought their attention, when they finally did notice me—my mom, my dad, my stepmom, my brothers—that’s when I learned they really wanted to hurt me, to⁠—

“Where’d you go?” Ace murmurs and I jump, totally belying my next words.

“Nowhere,” I lie.

Nowhere except the black hole that’s my mind, threatening to suck me down, to make me lose control, to turn me into someone who isn’t me.

This whole house is a black hole.

Too much like my childhood. Too full of complicated emotions.

I need to get into my spaceship and rocket far away, need to gather the frigid vacuum of space around me and use it to shore up my ice armor, especially when he says, “Not nowhere.”

I snag the wipe he abandoned, sit back onto the top of the toilet, and start scrubbing at my knees. “It’s been a long day. I need to help your mom cook dinner because, God knows, you assholes aren’t going to do it. Which means I need to get cleaned up, get bandaged up, and get down there. And somewhere in all of that, I need to change my clothes.”

“Why?” he asks.

A blip of triumph slides through me at the fact I was able to distract him. “Because I’m covered in grass and dirt and it’s not even my shirt in the first place.”

“First, silly goose”—he takes the wipe from me and starts cleaning my knee far more gently than I was—“you’re not cooking dinner. My mom is bound to be a ball of nervous energy after that scene in the back yard. She’ll probably have whipped up a three-course meal even before we make it back downstairs. Second”—he tosses the wipe in the trash then snags another one from the first aid kit, starts in on my other knee—“you look good in my shirt and if I delay you long enough you won’t have time to change.”

My eyes go wide but before I have a chance to reply, he keeps going.

“Third,” he says, tossing that wipe and going for Band-Aids, smoothing them carefully over the scrapes on my knees, “if you don’t change then I get to keep staring at your ass in those tight shorts.”

“Excuse me?” I ask dangerously.

He pushes to his feet, smirks down at me. “You’ll only be excused if you keep them on.”

“I—”

“Kids!” I hear Joan shout. “Dinner!”

Jesus.

Ace wasn’t kidding.

“Come on,” he says, reaching for my hand and pulling me up, guiding me out of the bathroom, and, for the record, in the opposite direction of his bedroom (and my changes of clothes).

He does it so effectively that we’re downstairs and heading toward the voices in the kitchen before I can so much as blink.

But once there, he stops us on the threshold and glances down at me. “Princess?”

“Um, yeah?”