All I Never Wanted (Excerpt)

Prologue

First and foremost, this is a story of redemption.

But it's also a love story. A love story that begins with a black eye and a mental health facility, and while that hardly seems the setting for a modern romance, and I'm the last guy anyone would consider a knight in shining armor, trust me when I say I'd suffer a thousand black eyes to meet her again.

But before there was the rehab and the fist to the face and the falling for a girl with jagged nails and graphite smudges on her fingertips, there was my dad's annual holiday party.

And it happened like this. . . .

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We were late getting home that night. I couldn't access the driveway as cars lined the street in front of our house—a string of Cadillacs, Porsches, and Jaguars, curves reflecting the glow of the street lamps—so I parked my Audi SUV in the first available space, directly in front of the neighbor's.

Despite the crowd the world outside was quiet, so when Crewe slammed the car door shut, the sound seemed to echo through the whole neighborhood, bouncing off gates and houses, giving our position away.

"Do you have to be so loud?" I hiss-whispered. My younger brother stood in the ditch, fist against his mouth, suppressing a fit of laughter.

I swallowed back a smile, trying my best to summon a serious face. My brother was a hilarious high. "Shut up, Crewe. I'm not kidding."

"No way can they hear us," he argued. But he managed to calm himself as we made our way along the Sanderling's wrought-iron fence until we reached the hedge wall of our own yard.

I zipped my leather coat all the way to my chin, flipped the collar over my neck, and told him to follow me. With Crewe, I'd always played leader.

I dropped to hands and knees, crawling between branches and leaves and trunks and remembered us as kids doing the exact same thing with our makeshift slingshots and twigs for guns—fewer ulterior motives in play.

The bush spit Crewe out as I climbed to my feet, brushing dirt from my knees and examining a fresh scratch on the back of my hand. Leaving was easy. It was the coming home that was so hard.

"Stay close to the edge," I warned him.

Our house was lit for the holiday. Two giant topiaries wrapped in twinkle lights bordered the front door, and a single wreath graced each of the twenty windows on the front of the house—a Greek revival with six towering Corinthian columns that my architect mother had custom made to mimic a home she and my father had seen on a walking tour on their honeymoon in Charleston. It was a walking tour because this was during their "ramen phase," when mom was still working on her master's degree and Dad wasn't president of anything. If she saw you to the porch on your way out, if she caught so much as an interested glance at the leaves carved into the capital, she would explain all of this and more—each of the home's architectural elements. She loved bringing up the ramen phase. It was a nice reminder that she, too, was common once. Never mind my grandparents financed her entire education and my parents' first home.

They didn't really subsist on ramen. It was just a metaphor.

Crewe and I snaked along the property line, winding between fruit trees and past the rose garden. The fountain in the middle of the drive shimmered, its spray carried away on cold wind.

I paused at the edge of the house, trying to determine the best way in. The front door was out, of course. So was the back. The garage would take us straight into the kitchen where the caterers were working. Our best option was the mudroom just off the front porch, an entrance for little boys and their dirty cleats, the help, and big boys who needed to sneak past a party without anyone noticing, but when I turned the knob it was locked, and when I removed my set of keys from my pocket, I knew we had a problem.