Chapter 2

Eighteen years ago, Greyport, Massachusetts was a harbor town going quietly to seed.

After the shipyard closed, most of the workers left. The ones who stayed spent their days between the bars, the repair shops, and the welfare office.

Jack lived there.

His mother worked the night shift at a cheap diner, and his father only turned up when he was drunk. By seventeen Jack had been in fights, had stolen cars, and had been picked up by the police for street racing.

People in town said it was only a matter of time before he went to prison.

The first time I saw him was at a Whitmore charity dinner.

He was wearing a borrowed white shirt, hauling crates of wine in through the back door. A drunk guest knocked a tray out of his hands on purpose, then accused him in front of everyone of having sticky fingers.

Everyone waited for the harbor boy to lose his temper.

Jack just crouched down and picked up the broken glass.

It was only when the guest turned to walk away that Jack put out a foot and sent him face-first into the fountain.

I watched the whole thing from the second floor and laughed out loud.

Jack looked up at me.

"You saw that?"

"Saw what?"

That was the first lie I ever told for him.

After that I started going to the shop where he worked.

I told my family I had joined a classical music club. What I actually did was sit in a garage that smelled of motor oil and watch Jack take an engine apart.

"You shouldn't be here," he said.

"Why not?"

"Your dress costs more than this garage."

"Then I can wear a cheaper dress."

Jack looked at me for a long moment, and then, for the first time, he smiled.

What I had learned at home was how to walk, how to smile, and how to say nothing wrong at a dinner party. My father picked my university, my friends, and eventually my husband.

Only around Jack could I sit on the floor eating pizza, swear out loud, and admit that I hated riding and hated being told I was born lucky.

Jack never treated me like something to be kept behind glass.

He would toss me a wrench, and when I broke a part he told me flat out that I was an idiot.

The night of my eighteenth birthday we climbed up to the abandoned lighthouse.

Jack told me he had decided to enlist.

"I can't stay here forever," he said. "Or one day I'll turn into my father."

"You won't."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're afraid of turning into him. The people who actually turn into him are never afraid."

He turned his head to look at me. The wind off the water pulled my hair loose.

"Will you come with me?"

I thought he meant down the lighthouse stairs.

"Where?"

"California first. See the Pacific. Then I report in and you start school."

"Why California?"

"Because it's far enough from here."

That spring Jack bought a junked old Ford for a few hundred dollars. He worked on it every night, and there was always oil on his fingers that would not wash off.

A month before graduation, he pressed the spare key into my palm.

"Prom night, eleven o'clock. I'll be waiting at the back door."

"What if the car dies on the way?"

"I'll fix it."

"What if we run out of money?"

"I'll earn it."

"What if my father comes after us?"

Jack was quiet for a beat.

"Then I'll drive faster."

I laughed and kissed him.

Back then we both thought the hardest thing in the world was an old car and an angry father.

We did not know that what rich people are truly good at has never been chasing you down.

It is taking away your right to leave at all.

Ten days before prom, my father called me into his study.

Jack's juvenile record was lying on the desk, along with a photograph of a boy in the hospital with serious injuries.

"Leave him," my father said.

"Is that your opinion, or your order?"

"It's your only option."

He pushed a prepared statement across the desk to me.

It said Jack had used a metal tool to assault the victim in a street fight.

But I knew Jack was not the one who had swung it.

"This is fake."

"True or false doesn't matter. What matters is who a jury is willing to believe."

Charles Whitmore looked at me.

"A punk from the harbor district with a record, or three witnesses from respectable families?"

That was the first time I understood that one lie really can destroy a person's whole life.