Breaking the Rules

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR



SATURDAY, MAY 9, 2009

1:15 A.M.


If someone had designed a level of hell especially for Eden, this would be it.

Stuck in a car with a man who’d just announced that he was leaving, heading toward a showdown with her jellyfish of a mother and ugly-mean dick of a stepfather, anxious that Dan was going to blame her for losing track of their little brother, and worried sick about Ben.

Izzy broke the strained silence. “I didn’t think to check Ben’s blood-sugar-meter thing before we left the apartment. You know, to see when he did his last reading.” He glanced at Eden. “Did you?”

She shook her head at yet another fail. “No.”

“How often does he need to do that, you know, check his insulin levels?”

“Before meals,” she recited, “before things like tests at school, before driving—although he doesn’t drive yet, before and after strenuous physical activity, in times of high stress, or if he’s just feeling wonky.”

“So … Not so much before running out to the store.”

Eden stared at the road. “Nope. And especially not if he left quickly—to escape the screaming.”

Izzy made an exasperated sound. “We weren’t screaming.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t know that we weren’t going to start—did he.”

Izzy sighed. “Eden—”

“Chht!” she said, making the hissing sound that the Dog Whisperer used on his TV show, to discipline an unruly animal.

“I don’t—”

“Chht!”

He had the audacity to laugh. “Well, that’s f*cking productive.”

She couldn’t let that one go. “Productive? There’s no more productive. You’re leaving. You’re done. And that’s fine. That’s great, actually. I’m glad you’re finally being honest with me. But what I don’t get is why you’re still here. In fact, you should just drop me off and go.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

Eden turned to face him. “Why?” she asked hotly. “Because with Ben gone, I suddenly ‘need’ you again? According to your definition—forget about what I really feel, what I really need! Because I couldn’t possibly be sincere or honest. I couldn’t possibly be anything but mercenary. If Ben’s in trouble, I need you, but if not, I don’t, so get lost so I can have my freedom to go screw an entire football team!”

“That’s not what I meant,” he argued.

“Isn’t it?” she asked. “Because it sure sounded like that to me. And why do you get to decide when I do or don’t need you, anyway? Why does it have to be life or death, if I need you or I don’t? Why can’t I just … need you—on an average, I don’t know, Saturday morning, when the sun is shining and the biggest challenge is deciding whether to go to the beach or the park for a bike ride? Why can’t I need you just to make the sun shine a little more brightly or to make the sky be a little more blue?”

Izzy glanced at her again, his face somber and mysterious in the glow from the dashboard, as he pulled up in front of Greg and Ivette’s house.

And Lord, Eden’s stomach twisted, because she didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to see her mother, to watch as her lips tightened disapprovingly. And wasn’t that covered in irony—the fact that Ivette could disapprove of anyone, considering her own track record?

Eden wanted to throw herself into Izzy’s arms and beg him to drive away, to just go—anywhere but here.

But it was possible that Ben was in that house or worse—that Greg had had him picked up by the god squad—lowercase g on god, because any so-called god who approved of those idiots’ decidedly non-Christian actions didn’t deserve the respect that came with a capital letter.

Besides, Izzy had been adamant that he didn’t want her throwing herself at him again, for any purpose. So she folded her arms across her chest and held on to herself instead. She could do this. She had to do this …

Over in the driver’s seat, Izzy cleared his throat after her little outburst. “You really expect me to believe—”

“No,” Eden said, cutting him off. “I don’t expect you to believe anything I say. You’ve made it more than clear that you don’t trust me, and maybe I deserve that. Maybe I earned it. And maybe you won’t ever love me—maybe you can’t. Maybe it’s entirely my fault, maybe I broke that in you, too. But you are not allowed to tell me that I don’t love you. You can reject it. You can discount it. You can be a total dickweed and laugh in my face and mock me for it. But you cannot tell me that I don’t feel what I feel.”

And with that, she pushed open the door and climbed out of the car on legs that were shaking. And great, now she was going to throw up, but she closed the door and briefly bent over, hands on her knees, closed her eyes, and breathed.

Izzy being Izzy, he refused to give her space, crossing quickly around the front of the car, in case she needed a hand.

She pushed him away as she started for the walkway to the hell-house. “You’re not allowed to touch me anymore. Just … go back to California.”

He stood in front of her, blocking her path and making her pull up short. “We’re supposed to wait for Dan and Jenn.”

“Danny’s not the boss of me.”

“And he’s not the boss of me, either,” Izzy told her evenly. “Sometimes he’s an a*shole, and sometimes he’s right, and this is one of the times that he’s right. And you know it, too.”

He glanced down the street, where, yes, those were headlights approaching. It was Dan and Jenn’s rental car, and both he and Eden watched as it approached.

Or rather Eden watched, because Izzy was still gazing at her as if he were trying to read her mind.

“You’re not allowed to look at me anymore, either,” she told him. “So just stop.”

He glanced over at the approaching car. Jenn was driving and she pulled up in front of the house and parked, waving at them as if they’d gathered for a family picnic.

But then Izzy touched Eden’s arm and looked at her, both actions clearly meant to be in-her-face violations of her latest rules. His words, however, were dead serious. “Eden, do you really … love me?”

And for a half a heartbeat, as she looked up at him, she thought maybe—just maybe—he was finally starting to believe her. But then he added, “Or do you just hate to lose?”

She jerked her arm away. “Screw you.”

“Sorry,” he said, wincing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded, like it was a bad thing, because I’ve got it, too, you know? This inability to accept that it’s time to quit. And that’s what I’m trying to do here. With you. Be a grown-up about the fact that we’re together for all the wrong reasons.” He glanced over to the other car as Jenni and Dan got out. “And I just wanted you to think about that and … You’re right—I don’t get to tell you how you feel, but … I just want you to know that … Well, shit, I’m eleven—ten and a half—years older than you, and most of the time I don’t know what the hell this is that I’m feeling.”

“Well, right now I hate you,” Eden said. “About as much as I ever have. I’m very clear about that.”

He nodded, still somber, as if he were actually taking her at her word. “There have been times that I’ve hated you, too,” he told her. “I’ve tried, but I just can’t manage to make myself feel indifferent.”

What was he saying? “Look, if you’re really going,” Eden said, wiping away the tears that kept springing into her eyes, “please, just go already.”

“Hey.” Jennilyn greeted them, looking from Eden to Izzy and back again, clearly picking up on the tension between them. “So this is going to be hard, huh?”

“Izzy’s got to go back to San Diego,” Eden told her new sister-in-law, who turned to Izzy with surprise.

But he was shaking his head. “Are you kidding? And miss this episode of Dysfunction Junction? I call dibs on hog-tying Greg. Assuming Greg’s gonna need to be hog-tied, which … is a pretty sure bet.”

Jenn was the only one who laughed. Dan was already grimly starting up the stairs, leading the way—taking the point, as it was called in the SEAL teams. He was still wearing his dress uniform, which was a nice touch when dealing with their mother, who’d always loved shiny things.

“We’re going to get through this,” Jenn told Eden, pulling her in for a quick hug. “Maybe it’ll be easy. Maybe Ben’s inside, and together we can get your mom to agree that living with Danny and me in San Diego is a good solution for everyone—because it is. We can do this. We will do it.”

It was all Eden could do not to cling to her, weeping. But Dan was already knocking on the door—the buzzer had stopped working a long time ago.

She let Jenn hold her hand and lead her over to the foot of the cracked and broken steps, with Izzy—who hated her, too—in the rear, clearly not going anywhere.


Eden and Dan’s mother came to the door with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Whozat, Ivy?” someone—Greg, had to be—shouted from the back of the house.

“It’s Danny,” Ivette shouted back in a voice heavy with nicotine-laced Southern sugar. She didn’t let them in, she just looked out at them through the screen, leaning close to whisper in a drunk’s version of sotto voce, “Why’d you bring her? You know seeing her makes Greg go all apeshit crazy.”

The her in question was Eden, and as Izzy watched, she stood a little taller, chin high. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words … He knew damn well that words could hurt pretty fricking badly.

“Nice to see you, too, Ivette,” Eden said as Dan spoke over her. “We don’t want any trouble. I know it’s late, but I got your message and … We’re looking for Ben. Is he here?”

“Benjamin?” she said as she took another sip of her drink, as if that would improve her memory.

It was pretty freaking amazing, seeing her in the flesh.

Eden had described Ivette to Izzy, back when they’d gotten married. He’d always thought she’d been exaggerating, but in truth she’d been pretty damn accurate. The woman was in her late forties—some years younger than Dan Gillman the elder, which made sense, because she had been his second wife. They’d married out of necessity when she was still a teenager, after he’d gotten her pregnant. She was formerly, fadingly pretty in an aging porn-star way. And if Izzy looked hard enough, he could see traces of Eden’s beauty in the shape of her face.

But the similarities ended there. Ivette’s eyes were a watery, washed-out blue and her hair was bottle blond, and her lips had been recently collagened, giving her a solid whiff of Stiffler’s Mom, if Stiffler’s Mom had been both ill-educated and a substance abuser. She was high on whatever meds she’d stolen from her most recent client. Izzy could see the drugs, along with the blurring effects of alcohol, in her out-of-focus eyes.

The woman didn’t open the screen to hug Danny or Eden, despite the fact that it had been well over a year since she’d seen either of her children. Of course, her hands were full.

Yeah.

“Is Ben here?” Eden pushed.

Her mother turned to scream back into the house. “Greg, is Benjy here?”

Just what they needed—Greg adding his personal brand of crazy to this nightmare.

Izzy stepped forward, reaching out to nudge Danny, who was clearly overwhelmed, and not in a good way. “Hey, man, why don’t we just go in and look around?”

Danny snapped back to life. “Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said, opening the screen. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

His mother stepped back, gesturing with her drink. “Knock yourself out.”

“You’re not letting them in, are you?” Enter Greg, limping out of the kitchen, with a bottle in his hand. He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on back in the hospital, days ago. Classy, all the way.

Eden took an involuntary step back, and Izzy stepped toward her, putting a hand on her back, even as Jenni refreshed the grip she had on Eden’s hand.

“You,” he said, peering out through the screen at Eden, his eyes narrowing. “You fornicating slut—”

Izzy didn’t need to move, because Dan was already there, on the same side of the screen as the dirtbag.

“You’re not allowed to call her that,” Dan said as he grabbed Greg by the front of the shirt and pushed him up against the wall. The bottle fell, but it didn’t break, and Ivette—another class act—went scrambling for it, apparently unwilling to waste a precious drop. “Not in my house.”

Greg was too skunked to know when to S-square, because he neither sat the f*ck down nor shut the f*ck up. Not that he could sit down, with Dan’s arm against his throat. Still, he could’ve managed the second S. Instead he sputtered and flailed and said, “This isn’t … You can’t … This is my house!”

“Daniel Gillman, you stop that, right now,” Ivette chimed in as if he were an unruly kindergartner, but the sudden parental tone simply didn’t cut it.

Dan ignored them both as he turned to Izzy. His face was composed, but his voice was tight and his eyes betrayed his soaring levels of stress. “Zanella, do you mind …?”

“I’m on it,” Izzy said, going up the steps and pulling open the creaky screen.

“And who is this?” Ivette asked, moving to block Izzy, shades of Mrs. Robinson radiating from her body language as she apparently noticed him for the first time.

“I’m your son-in-law,” Izzy said. “Mom.”

The M-word made her recoil, and Izzy moved past her, even as Greg chimed in with another chorus of, “I don’t want him in here!”

“You’re welcome,” Izzy told him because the bottle Ivette was now holding was one of the ones he’d sent.

He searched the house quickly and thoroughly, but none of the rooms were locked and all of them were empty. Still he checked every closet and even sifted through piles of laundry.

No Ben. No sign of him, even. No used vials of insulin in the trash or out on the counter in the kitchen—no insulin in the refrigerator at all.

There was, however, a mysteriously cleared-off kitchen table—odd because every other surface in the house was filled with clutter.

Hmm.

Izzy started opening cabinet doors, and hit the jackpot when he opened the cold oven to look inside. There was a rusted cookie sheet on the top rack, upon which sat a vast pile of pill bottles, all prescribed to one George King—presumably Ivette’s former hospice patient. Someone—probably Greg, crafty devil that he was—had started transferring the various medications into snack-sized zipper-shut baggies, where they would be, no doubt, easier for him to sell on the street.

Felony drug charges, anyone? Possession, perhaps, with intent to distribute?

Izzy took out his cell phone and snapped a few photos, careful to get pictures that clearly showed both the labels and the fact that the bottles were nearly full. Then he took one of the bottles and one of the baggies and slipped them into the pocket of his cargo shorts, because sometimes photographic evidence simply wasn’t enough.

Then he closed the oven door as quietly as possible, acutely aware that while his childhood had been unconventional, and while his own parents had been woefully inattentive, and his brothers had often been overly rough and frequently less than kind, he’d never had to deal with addicts and their ensuing criminal activity. And maybe Ivette hadn’t always been this way, at least not while Dan was growing up. In fact, she probably hadn’t.

Yes, his and Eden’s older sister, Sandy, had been a real mess, which had to have been hard to live with. And they’d all constantly dealt with the stress of Ivette’s cheating while their father was away.

But from what Izzy could tell, Ivette’s drug problem hadn’t started until after the loss of their home and their livelihood from the post-Katrina flooding. Danny had long since gone into the Navy by then, but Eden had still been a young teenager, and Ben? He’d been just a little boy.

And somehow, Ben had managed to remain one of the nicest, sweetest kids Izzy had ever met, despite his having to live day-to-day with this kind of bullshit horror show. But maybe his sweetness wasn’t such a mystery because despite that hell, he’d had Eden to love him, to protect him, and to raise him right.

Even though, through most of that, she’d been just a kid herself.

Out front, the conversation was growing more heated.

Get your dirty hands offa me! Greg.

Why would Ben be here, anyway? Ivette. Greg said he was staying with you!

Jenn’s voice, an indiscernible murmur.

Then Ivette again, louder: Danny! You got married, and you didn’t even tell me! You couldn’t wait for me to come home so I could be there?

Izzy exhaled hard, resisting the urge to rush out there and offer Jenn a thousand dollars to slap the bitch for him, knowing how badly it must sting for Eden to hear her mother say that—after Ivette had flatly turned down their invitation to attend Eden’s own wedding.

The best thing Izzy could do was finish up quickly so he could get Eden the hell out of here.

He continued to scan the kitchen, and he finally saw what he was looking for—a cell phone out on the counter. He couldn’t tell if it was Greg’s or Ivette’s, but when he flipped it open—it was a fairly standard low-budget model—he could access the phone’s recent history, where there was a list of calls that had been either made or received. The phone wasn’t sophisticated enough to differentiate between the two, but he quickly deduced that it was Greg’s phone, because there was no record of any calls to or from Danny.

But there were quite a few calls—dozens, in fact—made yesterday, before midnight, to the same four numbers—one of them identified with Ivette’s name—starting in the midafternoon.

He’s gay, Mom. Eden’s voice from out front. He was born gay. You can’t change that. You can only make him hate himself and really screw him up. I think he’s perfect.

Jenn: I do, too. He’s really a terrific kid, Mrs. Fortune.

It was nearly 0130, but hey. It was no skin off of Izzy’s nose if the peeps on the other end of those numbers woke up thinking Greg was drunk-dialing them.

He went down the list of mystery numbers, hitting TALK.

The first got him an automated message system for the State of Nevada’s Child Protective Services office. The second was an answering machine for the Church of the Righteous Redeemer. The third?

Bingo. But bingo in a really bad way.

You’ve reached Crossroads youth counseling center and school for positive values. This outreach helpline is open twenty-four hours, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, so please stay on the line for our next available life coach …

Life coach, his ass. Brainwasher, was more like it. Not to mention hate monger. Izzy cut the connection and went to Greg’s voice mail, to see if, like many people, he failed to delete his messages after listening to them.

But out in the entryway, Ivette and Greg were both getting shrill—more shrill—so he pocketed the phone to listen later, and went back to join the big show.

“And you honestly think”—Ivette was damn near screaming at Eden, who still stood with Jenn outside on the stoop, her face pale but determined in the glow from the porch light—“that Ben would be better off with you?! Look at how well you take care of him—you lost him. Again. As if what happened during the hurricane—you abandoning him at the Superdome—wasn’t disgraceful enough!” Ivette turned to Dan, who still had Greg against the wall, as tears streamed down her anger-twisted face. “Honey, your sister Sandy and I didn’t tell you this—you were under enough stress as it was, being over there in Iraq at the time—”

“I didn’t abandon him,” Eden interrupted. “I went to find insulin. Ben was dying! What was I supposed to do?”

“Maybe that would’ve been for the best,” Greg intoned. “Considering …”

“—but if you’re actually thinking about sharing a home with her”—Ivette spoke over them both, talking earnestly to Danny—“you really need to know the type of person she is—that she was screwing her own sister’s husband, right under the same roof.”

“That’s not true,” Eden said hotly. “And oh, my God, didn’t you hear what Greg just said about Ben?”

“I heard,” Izzy said, and she met his gaze—just long enough for him to see her fear. She was afraid—terrified—that he was going to believe the stupid shit her mother was spouting.

“Ron said it was going on for months,” Ivette shot back.

“Yeah, great,” Eden said. “Trust the crack addict. Because he’ll never lie.”

“Eden was fifteen,” Izzy said, and Eden looked at him again, even as Ivette countered.

“Going on forty,” she scoffed. “He had disgusting pictures of her on his cell phone.”

“Because he used to walk in on me in the bathroom,” Eden countered.

“Oh, so now you’re back to saying that it never happened?” Ivette sucked furiously on her cigarette. “Because that’s not what you told Sandy—”

“I told Sandy the truth.”

“That you sucked her husband’s cock,” Ivette shot back. “That he made you. How does that work, exactly? Without him holding a gun to your head?”

“Oh, my God,” Jenn said, putting her arms around Eden, as if trying to protect her.

“Jesus Christ,” Dan said. “You make me sick.”

Out on the stoop, Eden flinched, as if she were certain her brother was talking to her.

But he wasn’t—he was looking at his mother like she was some kind of monster. “Do you even hear what you’re saying?”

“You don’t know what she did,” Ivette implored him. “What she’s capable of. She was home with the kids, babysitting. After Ron relapsed, Sandy and I had to get second jobs, waitressing. We were working that night—”

“With a hurricane coming …?” Dan asked. “You left Eden home alone with three kids with a category-five hurricane—?”

“We didn’t have a choice. If we didn’t go in, we’d lose our jobs. Besides, they weren’t alone. Ron was there.”

“A relapsed crack addict?” Dan gave voice to Izzy’s own disbelief.

“He was clean,” Ivette said.

“He was not,” Eden countered. “He was using again. He was high, and when the time came to evacuate, I was not going to let Ben and those little girls get into his car with him.”

“Ron said they had a lovers’ quarrel,” Ivette countered, talking to Danny, “and she left him behind to die.”

“We argued,” Eden said. “And he hit me and he knocked me down and he tried to rape me, but Ben hit him with one of our cast-iron porch chairs. I grabbed his keys, and we got into the car and locked the doors, and he started trying to smash the windows—with his own daughters inside!—so Ben got us the hell out of there.”

“Except Ben conveniently doesn’t remember that,” Ivette said.

“He doesn’t remember much about any of it,” Eden said. “The hurricane or the Superdome … And I thank God for that!”

“He also conveniently doesn’t remember you abandoning him,” Ivette accused her. She turned to Dan. “She left him and Sandy’s girls with a stranger, so she could go meet Ron at the store.”

“Yeah,” Eden said. “Right. I left my brother, who was going into a coma from lack of insulin, and I waded through water that was up to my shoulders, so I could meet Ron at the store and give him a blow job. What planet do you live on? Although you’re right about one thing. I sucked him off. And I didn’t have a gun to my head.” Her voice shook. “Okay, Mom? Are you happy to hear me admit it? You’re right, I didn’t have to do it. I could’ve left the store without the insulin—I could’ve just walked away, and let Ben die.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Dan breathed. “There was insulin at the store.”

Eden nodded. “We went there, every day, after school. There was a minifridge in the back. I knew the power would be off, but I thought maybe it would still be cool enough. And I figured it was better than nothing. But when I finally got there? Ron was already there. And at first, I thought maybe he’d be sober and, I don’t know, maybe just a little bit glad to see me—to know that Kimmie and Kendra were alive. But he was still high, so he didn’t give a shit. You can relate to that, huh, Ma?”

“I’ve heard this sob story before,” Ivette started, but Izzy stepped forward.

“Shut up.”

There must’ve been something in his eyes, something dangerous, because she shut her mouth, fast.

“Sweetie, you don’t have to explain anything,” Jenn told Eden, who was still standing there, defiant, chin high, and ready for them all to side with her mother and call her a liar. “You did what you believed you had to do—”

Eden looked through the screen, directly at Izzy, and whispered, “He said I could have the insulin if I gave him a blow job. And I figured, I’d done worse with John Franklin, and it didn’t kill me, you know? It didn’t mean anything. It was just … sex. I just kept telling myself that. That it was nothing. It meant nothing. Except it did. It meant … that I was exactly what everyone said I was.” She looked at Danny then. “What you said I was, when you came home for Charlie’s funeral.”

Danny looked ill, but he didn’t get a chance to say anything, not so much as an I’m sorry, or a God, Eden, because Greg couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“We don’t speak his name in this house,” he said.

“Who? Charlie?” Dan asked, his disgust dripping from his words. “He was a hundred times the man that you are—you’re not allowed to speak his name.” He turned to Eden. “Eden—”

But she didn’t let him speak. “It didn’t mean nothing, but it got me nothing,” she told him, told her mother, told Izzy with eyes that were resigned and devoid of all hope that any of them would believe her. “Because I never made it back to the Superdome. I got picked up by a boat that took me to one of the highway overpasses, and I couldn’t get back to find Ben or the girls. I tried, and I tried, but I kept getting stopped by all these men with guns and … I offered them what I gave to Ron—you didn’t know that, did you, Mom? Come on, let’s hear you condemn me for that—for doing anything—anything to try to save Ben. But I failed.”

“Oh, honey …” Out on the stoop, Jenn tightened the hold she had around Eden. “But he was all right. Ben was …”

“He survived. Barely. Because a stranger gave him insulin. He was all right.” Eden shook her head, rigid in her self-hatred. “No thanks to me.”

“You tried,” Izzy whispered, through a throat that was tight. He’d imagined the hell that she’d lived through in the aftermath of the hurricane, but he hadn’t come even remotely close.

Eden looked right at him. “There is no try,” she said. “Remember?”

“This time,” Izzy told her, “Yoda’s wrong.”

“Ben was all right—no thanks to you.” Ivette couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “And, for the record? That’s not the story Ron told us, and he was very convincing …”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Izzy didn’t have to say it, because Danny did.

“Don’t you talk to your mother that way!” Greg said as Ivette gasped and then burst into a fresh flood of tears.

Dan ignored them both. “Get Eden away from this poison,” he ordered Jenn tersely. “Get her into the car.”

Jenni nodded, but Eden wasn’t ready to go anywhere. She stood her ground, still thinking first and foremost about her little brother. “Was there any sign of Ben?” she asked Izzy.

“I don’t think he’s been here,” he told her, but he couldn’t withhold the potential bad news. “But I found Greg’s cell phone, and he was talking to the people over at Crossroads earlier this evening. There were three different calls.”

“Oh, my God,” Eden said as Dan tightened his grip on Greg.

“You had no right,” he started.

“I have every right,” Greg countered. “No son of mine—”

“He’s not your son!” Eden shouted.

“Okay,” Jenn said, “sweetie, this isn’t helping.” She raised her voice to be heard inside the house. “Mr. Fortune, did you make arrangements for Crossroads to pick up Ben from Eden’s apartment?”

“I did,” Greg said. “And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Eden stood there, stricken, and Dan looked like he was damn near ready to choke the life out of the bastard as both Greg and Ivette continued to make a shitload of useless noise. Greg was proclaiming that he also had the right to call the police after they left, and have them all arrested for home invasion and assault, and Ivette chimed in with a still-teary and incredibly misguided belief that Crossroads was like a great, big camp, where “Benjy” would go and have fun, maybe meet some nice girls, because maybe he just hadn’t met any nice-enough girls …

Izzy had had enough. He put on his deadliest war-face, and stretched himself up to his full height. “Everyone! Shut!” he shouted. “The f*ck! Up!”

The sudden silence was deafening—there was definitely fear in both Greg’s and Ivette’s eyes. Good. He pointed to Greg. “F*ck you,” he said, and then he turned to Ivette, “and f*ck you!” Back to Greg. “I always knew you were a worthless piece of excrement, but you?” Back to Ivette, whose eyes were wide. “I always thought that there must’ve been at least something halfway decent in you, because you brought Dan and Eden and Ben into the world. I thought you were somehow responsible, but it’s clear that they became the outstanding human beings that they are not only without your help, but with your hindrance. So thank you for showing me this, for this little display tonight. Because now my respect for all three of them is completely off the scale.” He turned to the door, where Eden and Jenn were staring at him, too. “Ladies, to the cars. Danny, my friend, I’ll take Greg from you, from here. I want a few words in private with your a*shole pseudo-parents before I join you at the cars, where we will go—immediately—to Crossroads to pick up Ben, where he will be waiting for us.”

Izzy had it all figured out. Illegally obtained drugs, plus addictive behavior, plus threat of arrest and incarceration …? He was going to use what he’d found in that oven in the kitchen to buy Danny and Eden everything they wanted—Ben’s release from that prison of intolerance, and a signed letter granting the fifteen-year-old permission to go to San Diego and live with either his brother or his sister.

Izzy had it all figured out, until Greg opened his ugly-ass mouth, and smugly informed them, “He won’t be there. Crossroads has a half a dozen sister organizations, all across the country, used when certain family members are uncooperative. Benjamin is on his way to an undisclosed location right now. Even I don’t know where he’s going. All I know is he won’t come back until he’s cured.”

“You son of a bitch!”

If Izzy had had to put money on which of the Gillmans would lose their shit first on account of getting that kind of bad news about Ben, he would’ve picked Eden. But it was Danny who went over the edge as he tightened his grip on Greg. The older man flapped and flailed, but he didn’t stand a chance as his stepson choked the jumping bejesus out of him.

And maybe Danny was just trying to scare him. Maybe he was intending to stop before the old dude actually stopped breathing, but it sure as hell didn’t look like it.

Ivette didn’t think he was going to stop, either—her screeching started up again.

Jenn, too, was on that bus. “Please, Danny, don’t,” she said. She looked at Izzy beseechingly in a silent do something as she opened the screen door, stepped inside, and tried to pull Dan back. But all she succeeded in doing was hugging him—there was no way she could manhandle him away from Greg.

There was no way Izzy could do it, either. Not by force. Well, he could do it by force, but not without seriously damaging Greg in the process.

So Izzy did the only thing he could. He took Jenn’s lead, and just put his arms around Dan, too, holding on to him from behind.

“Don’t do this, brother,” he said quietly as Ivette wailed from where she’d fallen, prostrate on the floor. “This doesn’t make it better, it only makes it worse.”

And then Eden spoke up from her place of exile, still out on the stoop. “Danny, Ben needs you,” she pleaded. “And … I do, too.”

And with that, Danny finally released Greg. Izzy caught the old man and kept him from falling as the asshat gasped for air. Damn, he smelled bad.

“I’m done,” Danny told his mother. “Sending money, answering your calls … It’s over. And I’m taking Ben, even if I have to drag you to court to do it.”

“Don’t say that,” Ivette sobbed. “You’re my son, and I love you!”

“No, you don’t,” Dan said. “You only love your alcohol and your drugs. You want to be part of my life? You lose this a*shole, and you put yourself through rehab. If you do that? Then we’ll talk.”

He put his arm around Jenn and went out the screen door, where, on the stoop, he stopped and roughly pulled Eden in for a hug. “Eedie, I’m so sorry,” Dan said, his voice breaking.

And Eden—tough, resilient, screw-you-attitude Eden—started to cry, too, with deep, body-shaking sobs.

“Get them into your car, and wait for me,” Izzy told Jenn, who was the only one who wasn’t weeping—okay, well, she was, too, but she looked as if she could still see well enough to navigate the stairs. “I’ll be out in a sec.”

As they moved away from the house, Izzy turned back to Greg and Ivette.

“So,” he said. “I’m betting someone, somewhere, knows where Ben is …”