Lost in such desperate thoughts, he didn’t hear it right away when Felix spoke, and then he whipped his head around so fast he had to look like an idiot. “I’m sorry, what?”

Felix’s lips were curved faintly upward with amusement as he watched the road through the windshield. “I said: what made you want to prospect?” When Harlan only blinked at him, dumbfounded to have been asked something personal, he continued, “You’re nobody’s kid or nephew, and I haven’t everseen you hanging around the parties before. So what made you want to join?”

I used to sit and watch you for hours at a time. I wanted to step out of the bushes and introduce myself so many times, but I was always too much of a coward.

But he couldn’t saythat. So he stuttered out, “I – I dunno. I just – I always wanted to, I guess.”

It was lame and vague, and Felix cut a glance across the console, silently asking for more information.

Which Harlan couldn’t provide, because he was tongue-tied and useless, heart hammering wildly in his throat to have Felix’s attention fixed on him like this. He thought he might pass out.

“Is it the bikes?” Felix asked, and glanced back out at the road. “Plenty of guys start hanging around ‘cause they like riding. Some of them stick around once they realize what the life’s like, but a lot of them bail. No shame in it,” he said. “The club’s definitely not for everyone. At least not the guys who think it’s nothing but parties and Sunday rides.

“But,” he went on, and it was like now that he’d started talking, he couldn’t stop, but without any of Harlan’s manic jitteriness. He had a broad and rolling cadence, his accent deep and rich and yet easy to understand. It brought to mind all the times Harlan had seen him sitting and talking with one of his club brothers, conversations that went on for long minutes, sometimes even an hour. He liked talking, Harlan realized, struck anew by how much more comfortable he was with the Dogs than he was with his friends. In the clearing, he rarely spoke, but beneath the persona he wore around Colin and Tucker, he had a lot to say. “It’s a natural fit for plenty of guys. Clubs like ours got started after the war, you know, vets who didn’t fit back into society…”

And so Harlan sat, listening intently, to an impromptu history lesson on the origins of one-percenter clubs. Some of it he already knew, thanks to afternoons spent researching in the library, but much of it he didn’t, because clubs were clannish, and secretive, and didn’t trust outsiders with sensitive information. What a thrill that was: to be considered aninsider.

When they returned to the topic of Harlan’s – Hank’s – reasons for joining – Felix having shared that he’d prospected on his dad’s suggestion, as a way to make more money, but quickly found that he enjoyed being a part of the club – Harlan had decided on a reason that he didn’t think painted him intoopoor a light.

“I guess, if I’m being honest,” he said, and was beingmostlyhonest, “I haven’t…I haven’t ever fit in anywhere. Not at school, and not at home, and I…” Felix had said so much, and he felt the burning need to contribute – how could he have any sort of friendship with the man if he couldn’t have a conversation with him? “I got tired of being a loser,” he said, voice quiet, face burning.

Felix shot him a speculative look, and said, “Nah,” as he faced forward again. “Not fitting in doesn’t make somebody a loser. Losers are…” He frowned, and didn’t elaborate. Finally, he heaved a breath and said, “Well, not you, anyway. So don’t worry about it.”

Not you, anyway.Harlan stuffed the words deep, deep into his mind, and clung to them there, rubbed them like talismans.

They left the main roads behind, and then paved roads altogether, the van kicking up plumes of pale dust as they wended their way through thick groves of trees, jouncing over roots that snaked across the road, and finally passed through two posts and a leaning metal gate to arrive at a narrow tarpaper shotgun house shaded by live oaks trailing Spanish moss.

There was an old woman sitting on the porch, he saw, flat-shod feet working a rocking chair back and forth, back and forth, gnarled hands busy with knitting; sunlight glinted off the long, steel needles, as bright as the silver threaded through the waist-length braid draped over her shoulder.

Felix parked, and said, “Come on,” and Harlan followed, pulse accelerating, because this was no mere clearing full of dirty magazines and teenage boy arguments. This was Felix’shome. The place where he’d grown up; the place he went back to every time he brushed bark off his jeans and slipped off through the forest and out of sight, all those days that Harlan had watched him go with stomach aching and lungs tightening.

The old woman on the porch was deeply tan, wrinkled and leathery, eyes nothing more than beady black slits inside lids puffed with age and freckled from the sun. She glanced up at them as they approached, and for a moment, her gaze touched on Harlan, and was touched with a coldness so sharp it froze Harlan halfway up the porch steps. It lasted less than a second, her raptor-intense focus, an attention so violent and arresting he thought she might stand, and lunge forward suddenly to drive one of her knitting needles through his heart.

But then she tipped her head back and looked up at Felix, and all her wrinkles were warmth and fondness. She greeted him in French, and Felix responded in kind, before he half-turned back to Harlan and said, “This is Gram. She’s Dad’s mother.”

The woman looked back at Harlan, no longer murderous, but cool, guarded. She nodded, once, and turned her attention back to her knitting. As Felix led the way through the front door and into the house, Harlan saw her reach for the dented coffee can on the table at her elbow, and she spat a stream of dark tobacco juice into it.

It became quickly apparent that they didn’t have central AC in the house. A window unit chugged ineffectually in thesmall front living room, and when they passed into the kitchen, it was to the droning of two standing, oscillating fans that didn’t do much more than push hot air around, but which Harlan supposed kept the worst of the flies away from the stovetop, where a man who could only be Felix’s father stood dropping battered fish into a sizzling pan of oil.

Felix had to raise his voice to be heard above the noise of the fans. “Dad!”

The father – clad in a red plaid shirt and jeans, with a forehead that bore a dent from a hat band, three shades paler than the rest of his sunbaked face – turned toward his son, and smiled. It was Felix’s smile, though wider, and less self-conscious. A smile he turned just as readily and easily on Harlan, who nearly staggered beneath the force of it. No grown man had ever smiled at him that way before, not his father, or his stepfathers, or a teacher, or a coach. He had no idea what to make of it, and his insides went hectic in the face of it.

“You brought company,” the father said, and he had the same deep, velvet voice as Felix, if a little rougher from age and smoke.

“This is the new prospect, Hank.” Felix jerked a thumb his direction. “He’s gonna help me load the stuff.”

The dad nodded, and gestured with the spatula. “It’s on the back porch.”

The back porch proved to be deeper and cooler than the front, a ceiling fan whirling lazily over a trio of rocking chairs. It overlooked a short, sloping back lawn in need of mowing, and a private dock that extended out into the water, where a small boat with a massive engine was tied up at the end.

Harlan was so curious he momentarily forgot his nerves. “That’sthe boat you hunt gators in?” he asked, disbelieving. It didn’t look like it would hold two full-grown men, much less two men and a thrashing, half-dead alligator.

Felix, bent over inspecting a stack of cardboard boxes, straightened, turned to look, and snorted. “Yeah, that’s Bessie. We’ve been using her since I was just a little kid.”

“How?”

“Heh. Carefully. But Dad swears by small boats.” He glanced back at the house, then lowered his voice, a whisper so quiet Harlan had to lean in to hear him over the shriek of the cicadas. “Don’t say anything, but things have been good enough with the club that I’m planning on buying Dad a new boat. All the bells and whistles. With an actual wheel.” He grinned, delighted, and Harlan grinned back, though he had no idea how wheels came into play with regard to boats. He was a landlubber, through and through.