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been easily won. In rural Georgia, adolescent wildness was given a wide berth before it was looked on as anything other than good-old-boy-in-training behavior. Smoking and drinking and poaching a deer or two were hardly enough to raise any eyebrows. Drugs were a right step in the wrong direction—a step that all of them had taken as often as they could afford to. Upon realizing that the Landry brothers hurting themselves was not going to keep anyone up nights, they began to go that necessary extra mile. They hot-wired cars for joyrides, leaving them wherever they happened to get bored. They vandalized property. (Turning over the Coke machine in the basement of the courthouse was one of their favorite pastimes.) They committed all sorts of petty thefts and burglaries. Nothing hard-core in those early days. They’d left themselves room to grow.
    None of this, of course, applied to Saint Cam. It wasn’t like he openly sided against them, or ratted on them when he knew something. He mostly stayed in his room and ignored them. But whenever he’d have occasion to meet their eyes, he’d give them a look that left no doubt as to the degree of his scorn. They’d made his path difficult, and he made sure they knew he hated them for it. Meanwhile, he studied hard, kept his nose clean, and walked around with his put-upon attitude, as if nothing short of some great cosmic blunder could have landed him in a house with these people.
    The truth was, Cam knew better than that, he just chose to ignore it. He was too bright and too close to the source to be able to write them all off the way the rest of the world did. He couldn’t look at them and say “white trash, lowlife, end of story.” He knew damned well that wasn’t the end of the story. It wasn’t even the beginning.
    Jack himself wasn’t really sure where it began. Maybe it had to do with the polarity of his parents: Lucy, a sensitive and delicate beauty from an old Savannah family that no longer had any money, but whose remaining forty acres allowed them to keep thinking of themselves as landed gentry. (They’d all disowned her when she’d married Will.) And Will Landry, a lone hellcat of a man whose only parent had been a mentally unbalanced daughter of sharecroppers; he’d never known anything but poverty and rejection—a fact he did not accept quietly. The two of them had been attracted to each other because of their vast differences, and then spent the rest of their lives trying to kill each other for them.
    The boys had grown up caught in the middle. Lucy did everything to encourage the artistic inclinations they all seemed to have inherited from her—Cam’s prose, Ethan’s poetry, Tallen’s painting, Jack’s love of reading. Will thwarted her efforts at every turn; he was violently opposed to anything that made his sons look unmanly. He’d never managed to beat the art out of them (though God knows he’d tried), but he’d successfully trained them to sabotage their own efforts. All of them except Cam.
    As far as Jack was able to figure, the difference was that Cam had used his talent to pull himself out, and the rest of them had clung to art as a source of comfort in the prison they thought they had no hope of escaping. Was it really that simple? he wondered, thinking about it now. Did it all boil down to the fact that Cam had felt hope and the rest of them hadn’t? And, if so, where had that hope come from? Was it something a person was born with, like blue eyes? Had the rest of them just been born without it? Where was the justice in that?
    He chuckled to himself. Justice. What in God’s name was it going to take for him to stop considering the possibility that somewhere, somehow, the world was fair and life made sense? The truth didn’t have to be fair. The truth could be that Cam had been born with a chance and the rest of them hadn’t. Cam wouldn’t have liked