• • •

After the debacle with Gray's mom, I thought he'd be a mess for the foreseeable future, but he was right when he said that all he needed was closure. The weekend was a bit strange, none of us quite sure how to react after the outburst on Saturday morning, but the weirdness was dissolved when Mom and Tad cooked roast chicken on Sunday as a practice Thanksgiving and toasted to us.

Us being the four of us. We're a family now. That hits me sometimes when I'm not expecting it. When Mom and I first moved here back on a rainy May night, I never thought that our friendly neighbors would become our family but here they are, and I wouldn't change a thing.

The hateful voice I live with scolds me for thinking that, as though it means I'm glad Dad's dead. I'm not. My heart still lurches each time I see the slowly-growing tree, every time I water its roots, but I can't change the past. I can just be excited for the future, and I am.

I'm most excited for the near future. As in, the next few days. The next few hours, even. Class has officially broken up for the Thanksgiving break, almost a full week before Thanksgiving actually happens, so I'm heading down to Cincinnati with Liam for a bit.

As much as I love his family and as excited as I am to go back, I can't help but be a little apprehensive. His dad's there this week and after what Liam and his brothers said last time I was there, I'm nervous about meeting someone so severe. He sounds like a no-nonsense guy.

Gray and I are in Starbucks, hanging out for an hour before Liam's final class finishes. Navya already left. Her parents picked her up to drive down to Indianapolis to spend the week with family, so Gray's alone with Mom and Tad until I get back. I thought he'd be annoyed, but he actually seems kinda psyched.

When he drops down next to me with a couple of hot chocolates in his hands, he grins and licks the cream and says, "By the time you get back, I'm gonna be your mom's favourite child. That's your punishment for abandoning us."

I laugh and roll my eyes. It's so good having him back in good spirits. After he sobered up on Sunday, once his mom had left, he and Tad talked a lot about the future. Gray has held fast to his insistence that he's done with his mom, and he has seemed so much better since he cut her out.

"You totally would've abandoned us too if you'd had the chance to spend a few days with Navya," I say. "I'm just capitalizing on opportunities to advance my relationship."

He guffaws at that, his grin painfully wide. "You can't confuse me with big words, you know. I'm a very advanced reader. And human in general. I know that means you're gonna bone."

"Gray!"

"Sorry, make love," he says with a cheeky glint in his eye. I've really missed that glint. "I mean, you're about to spend four days with this guy in his home, in his bedroom, and you both wanna do it. It's gonna get done." He wiggles his finger at me. "I know you want it."

"Do you have to be so loud about it?" I take my hot chocolate from him and lick the cream that's starting to sink and drip. "You know what?"

He crosses his legs and rests his elbow on his knee, his chin in his hand, and makes intense eye contact. "What?"

"I've really missed you."

He sits up a bit. He looks surprised, then his face falls a bit. "I've missed me too," he says. "I kind of feel like some alien has been living inside me for the past ... however long it is since we saw her in the park." He stretches and shakes out his arms. "I think she took it when she left. For good this time." He gives me a serious nod.

"How're you feeling?"

"Good. Normal. Annoyed that she got so under my skin but glad I've got you and Dad and Jen, and Nav. I know I've been difficult recently, so thanks for not giving up on me."

"Never. Gray, I would never give up on you. Especially not for having a totally human reaction to a totally crap situation. I'm sorry I won't be around this weekend."

"Don't be. I think I need a bit of alone time with Dad and your mom. We can get to work on some important bonding and relationship building." He beams and winks and adds, "I don't think your weekend will be too dissimilar."

Before I can protest, he scoots closer and gets serious when he asks, "You're prepared, right? I mean, even if you don't plan to do it, it might happen."

"I know. I'm prepared," I say, thinking of the supplies Liam's mom gave me, waiting in my bag.

"Good. You're gonna be just fine. You have an amazing weekend of sex in a mansion and I'll, I don't know, go plant shopping with the grown-ups."

"Sounds like an ideal weekend," I say, and I hide my grin behind my mug. I really hope it will be a good weekend. I'm just about managing to keep my nerves at bay, especially as I'll be driving to Liam's so I can drive home again on Tuesday.

"To be honest, I think I need this weekend to make up to Dad and Jen. I think I've put them through their paces this week." He sighs, running a hand through his hair. "Maybe I'll cook for them. Dinner a la Gray."

"Sounds like a good idea."

"Just one question," he says. "How do you turn the oven on?"

• • •

I hate the Google Maps voice on my phone, butting into the conversation constantly, but I'm driving to Liam's and I don't trust his directions when he's looking at me half the time, or queueing up music on his phone.

"You know what's sexy?" he says when I seamlessly pull off the highway.

"What?"

"Watching you drive." He gives me a cheeky grin when we come to a set of traffic lights. "Is that weird? That I find it sexy?"

"No. I don't think so, anyway," I say. "I'll take the compliment."

"You should." He stretches and yawns and our eyes fall on the screen at the same time. Just a few more miles to go. Rush hour traffic means a route that was supposed to be three hours has already been four, and I'm ready to get out of the car now. My butt's going numb and my legs are cramping up.

"Nearly there," Liam says, rolling his neck so it cracks. I nod, eyes on the road, easing down on the accelerator a little harder. Not that I'll break the speed limit. Just reach it a little sooner. "How're you feeling?"

"Nervous," I say, my hands slipping down the wheel when we reach a straight stretch of road after a tricky junction.

"Nervous? Why? You've been over before." He turns down the music and turns his cheek against his headrest to watch me, one socked foot pulled up onto the seat and an elbow on his knee.

"I'm not nervous about being at your house," I say, "I'm nervous about meeting your dad. You've made him sound kind of scary."

"I won't lie, he can be kinda scary," he says. Great confidence boost. "But he won't really be judging you. I mean, by my age he had a kid and one on the way. He just wants to make sure we're not being idiots, I guess. Or maybe he wants to see if you'd make a good mother for his future grandchildren."

When I shoot him a slightly panicked look, he laughs. His eyes crease, the ray of a streetlamp bathing green irises in an orange glow.

"One step at a time," I say.

"Right. There's something we need to get used to if we're gonna be giving him grandkids," he says, still grinning. I slow at a fork in the road and he leans across to kiss my cheek, his hair brushing my shoulder when it slips out of a loose bun. I don't know how it doesn't drive him mad. When I tie my hair up, it's tight enough to give me a facelift.

I give him a side-eye, but he just chuckles and gives me a fond head shake, and he looks out of the window with a sigh. The next few minutes seem to drag on forever down quiet country roads, until my headlights catch the mansion that rises on the horizon and my apprehension flutters away. I'm just glad to have made it.

"Nine o'clock on the dot," Liam says. "Very nicely done."

"Will people still be up?"

"Daria's probably in bed, and Sam, but Dad's a night owl and even if Mom's exhausted, she'll stay up to see us. I mean, it's only nine," he says. He takes my weekend bag without question, and he laces welcomely warm fingers with mine as a cold fall breeze rolls through us. It's basically winter in my eyes. I can't believe Christmas is only a month away.

Before we reach the door, Liam's mom throws it open and pulls me into a hug before she hugs her son.

"Storie! It's so good to have you back," she says, squeezing me so tightly that I feel as though I'm seeing her for the first time since going off into a warzone. I feel a nudge and she laughs and says, "Talia says hi too. Only six weeks to go now."

It's crazy. She looks no different to the last time I saw her, not that long ago, and I couldn't tell that she was pregnant then either, but she's big. I never really thought about that before, that a baby bump isn't so much of a baby bump if you're already big all over.

"Hi, Allie," I say, hugging her back. "So you decided on a name?"

She laughs and says, "Well, it was between Talia and Katia and I may have forgotten that Vitaly's insufferable aunt is Katia, so he vetoed that one pretty quickly." She pulls Liam into a hug, and drags both of us into the house and shuts out the cold. "Daria's so excited to see you again, but she's a nightmare if she's not in bed by eight so it's all boys tonight, I'm afraid."

"Is Dad going to be awkward?" Liam asks. His mom chuckles.

"You know your father, honey," she says. "He likes to put you through your paces, but it's all in good nature. He hasn't seen you since August. A lot has changed!" Her eyes flicker to me and she grins, squeezing my hand. "I'm so glad you're back, honey. Daria and I need a little more female energy around this place, and I know Vit's looking forward to meeting you, even if he can be a little intimidating. He's a puppy, really."

Liam leans close to me and whispers, "Don't listen to her. I think her husband and my dad might be different people."

"Oh, shush." Allie rolls her eyes. "Don't scare Storie. Your dad's not that bad."

"You're biased," he says.

"Well, I've put up with him for twenty-four years," she says, "and the fire hasn't gone out yet." She pats her stomach and Liam grimaces. I stifle a laugh and grip his hand a little tighter with each step closer we get to the kitchen.

I can't help but picture Liam's dad as some kind of Bond villain. I know that's terrible of me, but I can't shake the image from my head based on what I've heard, and his name. I'm actually surprised when my eyes land on him and he's not a terrifying oligarch with a white cat.

Ok, he is terrifying. He's sitting at the table with a ramrod-straight back, thin glasses perched right on the end of his nose, and his cold blue eyes look like they could cut through metal when he looks up at us from the newspaper laid out in front of him. There's a hardness in his stare that makes something wither up inside me, and I want to crawl behind Liam when the stare lands on me.

He stands, tucks his chair in, comes over to us. "William," he says. "It's good to see you again."

"You too, Dad. It's been a while," Liam says, though Vitaly doesn't look like the kind of guy who'd like to be called Dad. Maybe father, or sir. "This is Storie, my girlfriend."

Vitaly turns to me and holds out his hand. "Wonderful to meet you at last, Astoria," he says, ignoring how Liam introduced me. "I've heard plenty about you from Allie. And, of course, Dasha seems completely smitten."

His handshake is firm. I try to match it. Kris is always going on about the importance of a good handshake. "It's really nice to meet you too, Mr Alexandrov," I say, and I feel like such an idiot when I have to ask, "Who's Dasha?"

"Daria," Liam says, stepping in. "Dasha's the Russian nickname."

Vitaly nods. "My daughter appears to be most taken with you. You're all she would talk about when I was putting her to bed."

Huh. I didn't have him pegged as the kind of guy who puts his kids to bed. I feel bad for jumping to conclusions, but Liam painted him as distant and scary. When we sit down with him and Allie, though, he doesn't seem to bad. He pays attention to my answers when he asks about my family and college, and I can see the cogs whirring as he compiles information about me. This does feel a bit like an interview.

We only stay downstairs for an hour. By ten, Allie can hardly keep her eyes open and I'm the same. Four hours on the road is enough to drain me and an hour of socializing on top of that, well, there's only so much I can take. Vitaly does have a very intense stare, and I felt like I was a specimen under the microscope the entire time.

It's a quarter after ten by the time Liam and I are alone in his room and I drop onto my back on his bed with a groan. He laughs and stands at the side of the bed, looking down at me.

"Ready for the third degree?" he asks.

"Wasn't that the third degree? He just spent an hour grilling me on life in Queens!"

Liam grins and sits next to me, leaning over my chest to pluck an envelope off the pillow. He holds it in front of my face, just far enough away that I can read my own name in looping cursive. Not just my first name, though, or even my first and last. My whole damn name.

"For the attention of Astoria Eszti Klotild Sovany," Liam reads out. "Like I told you, he's kind of intimidating and very extra."

"My full name? How does he even know that?"

"He asked me." He looks a little sheepish.

"You remembered?"

Even more sheepish. "I may have checked your license," he says. "Otherwise I would have misspelled it horrifically."

I sit up and take the envelope, carefully tearing it open, and I'm equally surprised and not when I unfold the contents to find some kind of questionnaire. "Jesus. Matthew wasn't joking about the quiz, huh?"

Liam snorts. "This is just Dad being ... Dad. You don't have to fill it out. He's just weird like this. I dread to think how hard Daria will have it when she's older. She's already a total Daddy's girl. He'll probably ban her from dating until she's thirty."

I scan the questionnaire, which seems like the kind of thing I'd have to fill out to apply for a visa or something. "Do I take drugs? Regularly, occasionally, rarely, or never."

Liam adopts a serious expression, ruining it when he pulls off his sweater and messes up his hair. "Very important question. I can't date a drug-user."

"I take the occasional Tylenol," I say, "and sometimes Advil. And I've had my fair share of Dramamine."

"Well," Liam says with a sigh. He finds a pen and leans over me to tick the box marked regularly.

"Liam!"

"It's true!" He grins. "This is a load of crap, so there's no point taking it seriously. Like, you're not actually going to say how many previous relationships you've had."

"Zero," I say. "Though I don't know if he'll view that as a positive."

"Then let's be on the safe side." He writes thirty-eight.

"I don't think any nineteen-year-old has the time to have had thirty-eight relationships. Even if they were all only a month with no gap, that's more than three years of solid dating." I take the quiz back and scan the rest of the questions. Plenty are innocuous, but the whole thing is just weird.

"He's taking the piss," Liam says, folding it on his nightstand. "He probably just thinks he's hilarious. He doesn't care whether you've had thirty-eight relationships or none." He kisses me, his nose pressing into my cheek.

"Liam?"

"Mmm?"

"How many relationships have you had?" I ask. It's one thing I realize we've never properly discussed. I'm not even sure it matters, like a number will make a difference, but I want to know.

"Three," he says, "including you." His eyes linger on mine and he knows I want details, so he indulges me without me having to ask. "My first girlfriend was Gemma Walton. We were in middle grade. We must have been ... twelve?" He shrugs. "It lasted a whole six weeks before school broke up for the summer and I never called her."

"Damn. That's harsh."

"In my defense," he says, holding up his hands, "neither of us had cellphones. And we were twelve. And I'm pretty sure she only wanted to go out with me because her best friend Mandy was dating my best friend, Cal."

"Ok, you're forgiven," I say. "What about lucky lady number two?"

"After the brutality of my first relationship, I took a bit of a break," he says with a laugh. "High school was more about sports and my friends and keeping my GPA high enough not to have Dad breathing down my neck."

"So no high school girlfriend?"

He shakes his head. "I didn't have time, to be honest. Then I met Caroline Albright when I was a freshman at South Lakes and she was a junior."

"Wow. Older woman, huh?"

He laughs. "Yeah. But she was the youngest in her grade, and she skipped a year, so it evened out. We hung out for a bit, hooked up a few times. We were officially dating for the last six months of my freshman year, but..." He shrugs. "It just didn't work out. Nothing messy."

"That's it?"

"That's it. You sound surprised."

"I am," I say. "I mean ... look at you. I figured you'd have had loads of girlfriends."

"Flattered as I am, I'm not much of a serial dater. And you know what they say." He touches my nose and grins. "Third time's a charm."

"Third time lucky," I murmur, and his grin widens when he kisses me.

"Oh, we can get lucky alright," he says, his eyebrows slightly raised, but we're out of sync. I'm too tired. I kiss him back and lean away.

"Maybe when I haven't driven four hours and been interrogated by your dad," I say, "and maybe after I've had a shower."

He lies back and lets out a low laugh. "You're killing me, Storie," he says, a jokey tone in his voice, as though he isn't the one who has said no every time since the first couple of weeks we knew each other.

"Die another day, baby," I say, "because now it's time for bed."

"You don't wanna finish the quiz?" He picks it up again and points to a random question. "Feel like listing all the members of your family?"

I roll my eyes and take the pen from him. Where it says maternal uncle(s), I write Krisztián Császár. I write the exact same name after brother(s) too. Liam snorts.

"You're terrible," he says, and he pulls me over for a kiss. "I love it." His lips trail along my jaw to my earlobe, his breath hot on my skin when he whispers, "Now, about that shower..."

• • •