Page 1 of Tracking Wolfe

PROLOGUE

WOLFE, AGE 13

I’d known Trace my whole life.

That was the thought I kept coming back to as I sat by the pool that afternoon, pretending to read. Trace had helped Dad teach me to swim in this pool. He’d been at every birthday, every barbecue, every Christmas morning sprawled on our couch with terrible bedhead and Papa’s good coffee. He was part of the landscape—like the oak tree or the vines or the way the summer heat made the air shimmer.

So I didn’t understand why my hands suddenly felt clumsy holding my book.

“If you burn that portobello, Derek, I’m writing a lament and making you sing it,” Papa called from the outdoor bar area, where he was spraying the counter down with cleaning solution before setting up the ingredients for frozen drinks.

“I’ve never lost any of your ridiculous vegetables yet,” Dad said.

The sliding door opened. I glanced up out of habit to see who it was.

Trace stepped out shirtless in his swim trunks, his chest already golden brown from wherever he’d been working for the past month. He grinned at Papa. “What’s the ruling on cannonballs, Marian?”

I’d seen Trace without a shirt a hundred times. A thousand times. This shouldn’t have felt like anything.

“You mess up what I just cleaned, you’re the one redoing it,” Papa said. “Welcome back to the real world.”

“Real world, my ass,” Trace said with a laugh, dropping his towel on the chaise near mine. “Hey, kid.”

“Hey,” I said. My voice came out strange. I cleared my throat. “Hey.”

He gave me that half grin he always gave me—the one that meant he thought I was funny without meaning to be—and walked to the pool. The dive was clean. Barely a splash. He always dove like that.

I looked back at my book, but my eyes wouldn’t focus on the words.

I could hear Trace swimming. Steady strokes, the sound of water moving. The same sounds I’d heard every summer since I was small enough that he had to hold me up in the shallow end.

I turned a page I hadn’t read.

When he surfaced and pushed his wet hair back, I told myself to keep reading. That’s what I’d been doing.

Reading. I was reading.

Trace swam to the far wall. Turned. Pushed off.

My chest felt tight.

I shifted on the lounge chair, and the towel scratched my legs wrong. My skin felt too tight for my body.

I shifted again, knocking my chair into the umbrella stand beside it. The umbrella wobbled, and I reached up to steady it, smearing sunscreen on the canvas.

“Trace,” Dad called. “Give Wolfe a hand with the umbrella before it decapitates him.”

“On it.”

Trace climbed out of the pool. Water streamed off his shoulders and down his back. The beads caught the sunlight like sparkling gems winking unexpectedly. He crossed the stone and reached up to grab the umbrella pole above my head.

I should have looked away. I looked away all the time—when Papa and Dad kissed in the kitchen, when actors kissed on TV, when anything felt like I was seeing something private. It was automatic.

This time, I didn’t.

Trace stretched to hold the pole steady. His arm extended over me, ribs visible above the slight bumps of his stomach muscles, water still dripping from his skin onto the stone beside my chair. The umbrella created a small shadow between us. I could smell chlorine and his deodorant—the same brand he’d always used, the same smell that had been in our house forever because he left a bag here and showered after using the pool.

Nothing was different.