Chapter 3
I woke up to the pleasant smell of burning wood. It reminded me of home. Not my apartment—even after nearly two years that didn’t feel like home—but of where I’d grown up with four generations of family crammed into one small house. I still remembered how the smell of wood smoke had seeped into the place’s bones.
We’d been lucky. The number of adults in the house were easily able to keep the roof over our heads and food on the table. We’d been very lucky. Until that luck had run out.
I opened my eyes.
I was on a couch in a room lit by a small lamp and the warm, golden glow of a fire. Dreamboat sat across from me in a chair, legs crossed at the knee. It felt extremely late and from my angle I couldn’t tell if he was reading or if he’d fallen asleep.
I rolled onto my side to g
