Chapter 5

“If I tell your father, he’ll do much worse.”

His father: She always called his stepfather, Chandler Parquist, his father when everyone knew his real father had been someone else—someone kinder, handsomer and darker but without the money and connections of his stepfather. Or so he imagined. It was not the kind of thing, he understood, you discussed.

Instead, Quinnie sat in his room, smarting from bruises and bruising words, wiping his eyes with his forearm. After a while, having tired of sulking like Achilles in his tent, Quinnie emerged from his bedroom to hear male voices coming from his mother and stepfather’s bedroom.