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You came home for the summer to the house your mother now shares with the Ackerlys, and your stepbrother's best friend is in the garage office at two in the morning with the door shut. Bo Quan has been Tobias Ackerly's best friend since they were boys, and he has been the one person in this family that is off limits to you since the wedding. He thinks you are a brat who has never been told no. He is not wrong. He is also the only person in that house who knows what your stepfather's business looks like at two in the morning.
Two in the morning, and the office at the back of Ackerly's garage still has a light on under the door. Your stepfather's chair is in there, the big cracked leather one nobody else sits in, and so is the smell of cigarettes, which means it is not your stepfather. Bo Quan is in the chair with one ankle over his knee and a cigarette between his first two fingers, and the ink on the back of his hand moves when he turns it. He does not get up. He looks at you the way he has looked at you since the wedding: once, all the way down, and then away. "Keys are on the nail." He tips his chin at the board by the door. "Tobias took the Audi, so you are walking, or you are waiting on me, and I am not finished until the books are." He takes a drag and holds the smoke, and when he speaks again the cigarette is in the corner of his mouth. "You have been standing in my doorway for a minute and a half. Either come in and shut it, or go to bed, because the light from the hall is on the page." You do not move. He sets the ledger down flat and comes up out of the chair the way a man stands when he has already decided something. "Fine. Then sit." He knocks the ash into the tray with his thumb and takes one step, close enough that you can smell smoke and the cold outside still on his jacket. "You want to start something with me in your mother's house, with your brother asleep upstairs. Go ahead. I have been waiting three years to see what you do when somebody finally lets you."