“Hey, Brandon,” Alex called out as soon as the door to his spare bedroom opened. Heavy footfalls could be heard in the hall.

      The lean teenager appeared with a baseball cap backward over his sandy-brown mop of surfer-dude hair, his perpetual slouch and frown firmly in place. He answered with a grunt, his usual greeting. Alex was probably supposed to feel privileged that he’d responded at all. Whoever thought mood swings were exclusive to teenage girls hadn’t met any teenage boys.

      “Did you get your homework done?”

      Brandon grunted again. Who had kidnapped that sweet little boy he’d known and left this crabby teenager instead? It wasn’t a fair trade as far as Alex was concerned.

      “Was that a yes?” Alex had considered working out a communication system with the boy—one grunt for yes and two for no. Maybe they could add eye blinking and finger snapping to increase their vocabulary.

      “Yeah,” Brandon said.

      For the last hour, Alex had lain sprawled on his living room floor working with Chelsea on an impossible puzzle of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak. He’d hoped Brandon might join in, too, but he was glad now he hadn’t been holding his breath waiting for it. The boy barely paused by the closet for a jacket before heading to the front door.

      Alex sat up first and then stood to face the boy. “Where are you going?” He’d hoped to keep the annoyance out of his voice but hadn’t quite managed it.

      There was only so long that they could all walk around on eggshells, trying not to set off Brandon before Alex had the urge to stomp the shells to dust. Alex figured he’d been plenty patient already, not insisting that Brandon get a haircut and not blowing a gasket over the hat the boy insisted on wearing in the house.

      The hot look that appeared in Brandon’s deep brown eyes and the tightness of his jaw suggested he didn’t think Alex had a right to ask questions, but the boy mumbled an answer anyway. “To Jake’s.”

      “Who is that, where does he live, and what are you going to do there?”

      Ah man, when exactly did you turn into your parents? Was it the moment he’d agreed to bring his cousin’s two children into his home, or was it a nanosecond after that ill-conceived decision? Either way, he now had everything in common with his parents, except for his dad’s pocket protector and his mom’s ode-to-the-fifties haircut, and the two were probably laughing down from Heaven right now.

      Brandon must have conveniently forgotten the first two of the three questions because he only answered, “A bunch of us are just going to hang out.”

      Alex might be new to this parenting business, but did Brandon really think he’d been born the day he accepted guardianship? He’d even survived his teens, somehow, and he knew most of the tricks. “A bunch of us” was probably just code for kids with names like Spike and Rex or, worse yet, Brittney and Nicole. And “hanging out” was something teens did when they didn’t have anything better to do than to pack at somebody’s house and get into trouble.

      He didn’t know if real parents had moments of panic where they were certain that a wrong decision could mean disaster for their kids, but Alex understood he was at a crossroads. One wrong move and…oh, he didn’t want to think about what could happen.

      “I guess I’ll see you later then,” Brandon said with hope in his voice.

      “Nah,” Alex said, already shaking his head. “I don’t think so.” He paused, searching madly for a good reason, and then his gaze landed on the wall clock.

      It was already eight o’clock. “I don’t think hanging out is a good idea, especially on a school night.”

      Brandon stared at him as if he’d suddenly grown antlers or something. “Are you kidding?”

      Alex shrugged. “Not much of a comedian.”

      “I live in a prison.”

      “The food’s probably better in a real one,” Alex shot back, trying to lighten the tense situation, but Brandon was already out of earshot.

      The boy’s stomping would have drowned out any comment he’d made, anyway. Once Brandon reached his room, he rushed in and slammed the door behind him. Soon the house vibrated with the bass sounds of the teen’s awful music, but at least he was inside and safe.

      Alex released the breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding. He’d dodged a bullet, and he would be foolish to believe it would be the last one Brandon would lob at him. Chelsea wasn’t the only one taking her mother’s illness hard. Brandon was acting out, and Alex didn’t know how to handle him or to help him.

      He felt as powerless as he always did when he looked at the ruins of a fire his station had reached too late. Who knew parenting could be so hard? He’d always imagined children as a part of his future, but maybe this was a signal that he wasn’t cut out for the job.

      The whole nasty scene had taken place with Chelsea lying on the floor and fitting more pieces of the puzzle than Alex had all night. Now the third-grader popped up and moved to sit cross-legged.

      “Brandon’s mad,” she pointed out needlessly.

      “I gathered that.”

      She twirled her fingers through a pile of white pieces destined to find a home somewhere in the puzzle’s snow-capped mountains. “He just misses Mom and Dad.”

      Alex swallowed. He’d been waiting for this, had prepared himself for when she would talk about her feelings, but Chelsea chose to come to him now, when his temporary parenting well was all but bone-dry. Still, he had to step up. He could handle a four-alarm fire, and he could do this.

      “You probably miss them, too.”

      Chelsea’s tiny right shoulder lifted and dropped. “I hope they’re okay.”

      “Yeah, me, too, kiddo.” He lowered himself to the floor and painfully bent into a pretzel seating position to face her. “I’m sure they will be. God’s watching out for them, you know.”

      “I know. I pray for them at bedtime.”

      Alex hoped the awe didn’t show in his expression. What he wouldn’t have given to have that kind of childlike faith. She just listed her petitions to God and waited on Him to do the rest. For Chelsea’s sake, Alex hoped she received the answers she wanted because he’d been around long enough to understand now that God sometimes said “no.”

      “That’s good to pray for them.” He would have known that she did if he would have remembered to share nighttime prayers with Chelsea, but he could worry about his failures later. This was about her. “It’s okay to be scared, too.”

      “I