from the people he cared about so none of them would be caught in the destruction.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered, “but I’ve made up my mind.”
She lifted both brows, her forehead wrinkling with one single crease. “Where are you going to start?”
He wasn’t quite sure about that, either. But his brother had been singing the praises of Cherry Creek for two damn years now. Every time he and Simon went back to visit, he’d come home and wax poetic about the someday when they moved back there—after Simon was done with school, after Rocco was ready to retire. Lorenzo had hated that place at first, but now he was starting to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something there for him to find—if he gave it a chance.
And if not…well. There was an entire world out there. He’d seen a lot of it, but maybe he could find more beauty with fresh eyes. But he had to start somewhere.
Chapter Two
‘We named you Wilder, because you are our wild boy. You are the child we dreamed of having the day we agreed to marry each other. You spent nine months never letting me forget you were inside me, and the moment you were out, you looked at me with these big, brown eyes, and I knew you were mine.’
It was a single entry in his baby book—the first hour of his life with a Polaroid photo of himself nestled in a bassinette with a shock of dark hair and his thumb in his mouth. The photo was dated—a mark of the late eighties with the ancient medical equipment and the Care Bear blanket that had kept him swaddled. A nurse had taken the photo, and she had pasted it into the book that night as he slept. His father had been the one to tell him this story after he found the book, when his questions flicked over his fingers, ‘Did she ever love me?’
The answer was yes. For a moment, she did.
It was irony at its finest that he was too young to remember what might have been the only kind words his mother ever said about him. They were written in the book, memorialized as maybe a way of mourning that she had lost the one child she had desperately wanted.
Twenty-four hours after his mother had looked into the face of the one child she had been dreaming about, the nurses returned with a smile and a certificate with a little bunny on the front declaring him an outsider.
‘Today I passed my hearing test!’
The very birth of him had denied her the child she’d been wanting since the day she married her husband. Twenty-four hours of life and would remain then and forever, a constant reminder that he was never going to be enough.
His sister had come along after that, three long years of waiting for the child his mother could finally call her own. Wilder had been raised no different than a Deaf child, but to her, he was an outsider.
He was an interloper who had defied generations of genetics that produced a legacy of Deaf Pride long before they had rights and privileges and jobs. When spoken language was drilled into them by angry-faced hearing teachers forcing them to sit on their hands and repeat the mimic of sounds until it resembled nothing like speech, his parents had raised their hands and declared they would not be defined by the hearing.
‘Never my children,’ his mother would say. ‘Never them.’
She didn’t like him, but she was determined to raise him with the same cultural values as everyone else in their long legacy of Deaf identity. It was the one thing about his childhood he didn’t regret.
Wilder’s voice was used for unintentional sound—crying, laughter, screaming at the top of his lungs as he ran through fields. And no one ever noticed, and it never mattered.
But he was an outsider. The Deaf school wouldn’t take him, and with good reason, but it forced him to endure a culture he just fundamentally didn’t understand. His mainstream school sent him to hours of speech therapy, and the teachers there were frustrated because he was capable of spoken English, but it didn’t make any sense to him. He would sit in lessons for hours and try to repeat the things they told him, and he didn’t know why, because it was so much easier to just sign. He was tired of being punished, tired of being forced through sentence after sentence until his