“Close early today?” I walked the worn dirt path from the garage drive to the trailer’s front door. I couldn’t see his eyes; his sunglasses were too dark.

“Yep. Had an errand to run up at the high school.” His forearm flexed under the light brush of copper hair as he turned to stub out the cigarette in a makeshift ashtray—a ceramic pot three-quarters full of sand.

“Really? Doing what?” I ripped my gaze from his arm when he turned back.

“Hiring one of Silva’s students to help me out in the garage, hopefully.” Grimacing, he reached to scratch the back of his neck. “I don’t know though. Might be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“I think it’s a great idea.”

As I reached him, he shrugged and stood. “We’ll see, I guess. You said you had a problem? Come on in and let’s solve it.”

If only it were that simple. I’d never thought of myself as helpless, but Boyce was running a business and his life, and I had no job, no money of my own.

I followed him into the trailer, which seemed darker in broad daylight than it had when I’d come over the other night. We both removed our sunglasses.

As if reading my mind, he said, “Sorry it’s so dark in here—trailers aren’t exactly famous for great lighting design. Your eyes will adjust in a minute, but I can switch on the lamps if you want. I could walk around in here blindfolded, so I don’t really think about it.”

“It’s fine. I didn’t prepare a graphic presentation or anything. I just need to talk this out. You sure you don’t mind?”

“’Course not. You can always come to me—you know that.” He sat on one end of the sofa and I took the other. “So what’s up?”

We leaned into our respective corners, facing each other.

“I just finished my first week of class. It’s an adjustment from work I did for my BS, and even more so from what I ever imagined doing as a postgrad, but I love it. My two classes are small—just a handful of people. I already know everyone. We took a boat out and gathered samples to help one of the professors run lab tests, and it was nothing like being an undergrad at a huge school where you have little to no autonomy. He was like, ‘Go do this,’ with almost no direction, which was like being a peer instead of, you know, a minion. A low-ranking peer, but a peer.”

He smiled. “Sounds great. And I’m not hearing the problem.”

Closing my eyes, I sucked in a deep breath. “The problem is I got accepted to Michigan. Med school.”

“I don’t understand. Thought you said you weren’t going.”

“I applied to several schools, and I was actually accepted to the majority of them. When Mitchell and I chose Vanderbilt, I turned the other acceptances down. But I was waitlisted at two—Harvard and Michigan.”

“At the risk of showing my hick side, what does that mean, exactly—being waitlisted?”

“It means you met the qualifications, but other candidates met them better, so they got the offers to attend. Waitlisted applicants are put in a queue. You only get an actual acceptance if enough of the candidates ahead of you decide to go elsewhere and you’re high enough on the list. I got an acceptance letter today—which Mama opened before I got home.”

“Ah. So she’s all fired up about you changing your mind.”

I chuckled joylessly. “Fired up is a good way to term it. I want to do exactly what I’m doing, but she’s made it really clear that she and Thomas don’t support that decision, which could mean I’m on my own financially. I know this will sound incredibly naïve and immature to you—but I’ve never had to take care of myself in that way. I grew up understanding that there were things I couldn’t have because Mama couldn’t afford them. I never asked for anything I perceived as unreasonable, but I was still a kid. I wasn’t always sure. After they got married, money was no longer an impediment. What I got or didn’t get was based on factors like safety or whether it would distract me from my studies. Things that had little or nothing to do with the expense. As a result, I’m… I’m spoiled.”

Sitting forward, he leaned his forearms on his thighs and his eyes promised the frankness I both wanted and dreaded. Boyce never lied to me. That was why I often sought him out when others might have made more sense on the surface—because he told me, bluntly, the truth as he saw it.

“I grew up shifting for myself instead of being looked after,” he said. “It was do or die and I chose do. But I think there’s a difference between spoiled and privileged. Your best friend thinks she has a right to anything she wants without earning it. That’s spoiled. Privileged is what anyone with sense would want for their kid. Your needs were seen to. Most of your wants too, maybe. But that’s nothing to feel guilty over. And it doesn’t mean your parents get to decide your life for you.”

I’d never thought of it that way. Privileged was something I became when Mama and Thomas married, though compared to the hand Boyce was dealt, I’d been privileged my whole life. Since he used her for an example though, I felt the need to defend Melody. “Mel’s parents have always dangled material things in front of her to manipulate her, you know. She earns what they give her by relinquishing any claim to make her own choices.”

The answering set of his jaw told me he would always fight granting Melody any sort of concession for her overindulged behavior. I couldn’t blame him. She’d been unkind to his best friend in high school. He didn’t know her like I’d come to know her, or the lengths to which her entire family went to control her.