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the window down a little more, pulled in a deep breath of the warm, moist air, and stared out at the dark highway ahead of them.
    “What was it like in there? In the hospital?”
    Anthony asked. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” he added quickly.
    Rae let her eyes drift shut. She saw her hospital room with its two single beds, her roommate pretty much always asleep unless one of the nurses forced her to participate in one of the activities.
    “The place was okay,” she said. “Except the smell. Way too much disinfectant. But I didn’t know about the fingerprints thing. I was sure I was going crazy, and I was so afraid I was going to die in there, like-” She stopped, biting her lip.
    “Like,” Anthony prompted.
    Why shouldn’t she tell him? He knew so much already. And he’d been there for her in a way almost no one else had. Rae took in a deep breath. “Like my mother,” she said in a rush. “She got put away when I was a baby. She died in the hospital a few months later.”
    Anthony’s head jerked back slightly, but his expression stayed the same. He cut a sidelong glance at her. “Do you think she had the same thing you did?
    Maybe she wasn’t really, uh, sick, either.”
    “I didn’t tell you everything about her,” Rae admitted. “She wasn’t just put in an institution because she was sick. It was because-” Rae couldn’t say it. She’d never told anyone this part. She tried not to allow herself even to think it.
    “She did something terrible,” she finished. “But they found her unfit to stand trial, so she was put in the hospital.”
    Please don’t ask any more questions, Rae silently begged.
    “I don’t know what to-wow,” Anthony mumbled. “That sucks.”
    She could hardly believe she’d spewed like that, gotten so close to telling him everything. But riding in the car in the dark, it was like a weird kind of slumber party-where the conversations always got really intimate, confessions of fears and crushes and dreams coming out all over the place.
    Rae let out a long sigh. “I guess that didn’t really answer your question. The answer is, I don’t know if my mom had the fingerprints thing. But I hope she didn’t. Because if we’re alike in that way, maybe-”
    “You’re not your mother,” Anthony cut in. “My mother and me-we’re nothing alike.”
    “You could be like your father,” Rae suggested.
    She knew he’d wondered about that. He’d never told her, but once she had matched her fingerprints up with his and gotten a wave of Anthony thoughts and feelings.
    “Maybe,” Anthony answered, keeping his eyes on the road now. “Sometimes I hope I am, just because…”
    “Because why?” Rae asked, still under the spell of the darkness.
    “Because I don’t really want to be like either of my stepdads, that’s for sure,” Anthony answered, his voice edged with iron. “Or any of the various almost stepdads who’ve lived with us.”
    “You don’t have to be like your dad to not be like them,” Rae pointed out.
    “Yeah. But… I don’t know. I’d just like to have the chance to find out. If my old man’s like Jesse’s, a total waste of space, I’d want to know. Jesse doesn’t sit around hoping his dad will call one day or just walk in-” Anthony stopped abruptly.
    “I get it,” Rae told him. She had an impulse to reach out and touch his hand as he steered, but she didn’t.
    “Knowing the truth about my mom hurts. But it’s better than having some fairy princess mother in my head.
    Probably.”
    “Probably,” Anthony agreed. He pressed down on the gas, and they flew faster into the night.

Chapter 4
    Are you sure it’s on this street?” Rae asked.
    She was sincerely hoping Anthony would say no. She’d thought Jesse’s neighborhood was kind of run-down, but the houses on his street were palatial compared to these… shacks. That was pretty much the only word for them.
    “That’s what the guy at the gas station