Chapter 1

Taylor cracked the seal on the bottle of Redbreast 12 Year that he’d bought for just this occasion. He held the bottle aloft as he twisted the cork free. A new town, a new place, a new job. Relief, heavy and pure, melted over him.

Taylor swirled the whiskey in a glass he’d bought just for swirling whiskey, and sipped deeply, gagging momentarily at the taste of nail polish remover. A handful of ice was added on top, and Taylor blinked the fresh inklings of moisture from his eyes. He sipped gently, and breathed in the smell of fresh air and cardboard boxes. It smelled like freedom. The walls were still bare and gray, the boxes along the walls still unpacked, the furniture still en route. But, with the light shining in above the river outside, and the cold drink in his hand, it was feeling pretty damn peaceful.

And the quiet. My God, the quiet, he thought.

After his childhood home, then university, and then back with his mother in the townhouse, this was absolute bliss, Taylor decided. Absolute bliss.

The sun was fully gone by the time he started looking for dinner, his eyes flickering up and down the screen of his phone as the options scrolled by. D.C. had a hell of a lot more to pick from than Dansville, NY, where his father had kept the family stashed away for nine months out of the year (valiantly protecting them from the press, “so they could live a life of normalcy”).

... And to keep his mistresses and wife as far apart as he could, without suffering through too long of a flight.

Taylor swirled the dwindling ice cubes around in his glass, gulped down the last of it, and set it aside. It would be easy to be bitter, and cynical, he knew. His friends from college were also wealthy, and they had all run with that idea. To be angsty young men growing up in their father’s shadow, to bear the burden of expectations and privilege, to have nothing required of you, and no attention paid ... The call to whine a lot about it was certainly understandable, but it had never quite interested him. He was often just too busy, he thought. His father had his life, Taylor had his. Even his mother, he supposed, might have her own things to be caught up in. It all worked rather well for them.

Exactly one pad Thai and two more drinks later, his mind was gently twirling, and he collapsed onto his boyhood mattress, which lay unceremoniously and unevenly on the hardwood floor of what would be his new bedroom. Stars shone down through high, wide windows above him.

For the first time in a very long time, the weight of the world slipped gently from his shoulders, and he fell right to sleep.