Joey had known. The minute the call first came in, Lynn calling all of them and asking if they'd heard from Justin, asking if anyone had seen Justin in the two days since he'd left Joey's at the first light of dawn flush with new resolution and a desperate need to get some sleep, he knew. It ran in his family, just a touch; his mother thought nothing of calling him up and telling him not to take the interstate home, or reminding him to check his mail, or telling him to call the friend from high school he hadn't seen in years. He had grown up with it, understanding it and accepting it, and when he started noticing himself doing it, it was the most natural thing in the world.

Joey had known. The police had come around with their questions, and they'd all waited for the ransom demand, and Joey had known that it would never come. He stood over Briahna's bed, watching his daughter, his daughter, fast asleep, and Kelly had come up behind him and rested her head on his shoulderblade. "What is it?" she asked him, her voice low to avoid waking Bri. "What's wrong?"

She'd learned to read him, over the years, slowly and painstakingly. She was, perhaps, the only one who really could, could see underneath what he showed everyone to find what he wasn't saying at all. "Justin," he said, no more, and Kelly took him by the shoulders and turned him around and led him to bed before his brain could tell his body that it wasn't allowed to sleep anymore.

Chris hadn't wanted to talk about it, and Joey knew why. Joey always knew why; sometimes it felt as though he knew all of them better than they knew themselves. Chris blamed himself for having been the reason Justin had been on the road that night, for having been the reason that Justin had been wherever he'd been to fall prey to whatever he'd encountered, for finally having given in to what Justin had been seeking for years and then despising himself for the weakness. There were no words possible for Joey to tell him that it wasn't his fault, because there were no words possible that Chris would believe. Joey just stayed, waiting, watching, watching all of them and knowing there was nothing he could possibly do to make it all better. It was the first time he could ever remember being at a loss for an answer.

They came to him, each of them in turn, when they needed someone just to be there. The bedrock, stable and solid and never shifting. Chris called Joey to bail him out of the drunk tank every time he found himself there, and Lance brought him the horrors and degradation of freshman year, and JC appeared on his doorstep when he was done falling off the face of the earth. Joey answered the phone and drove the car and turned down the sheets of the guest bed and never once asked any questions, never once said no, because he was a Fatone and a human being and he knew, he knew, the way you help your friends is by giving them what you can and then getting out of their way so that they could help themselves.

Joey sometimes wondered, as the weeks ticked by and turned to months, as the months dragged by and turned to years, whether any of them would ever learn that they wanted to help themselves, much less how. He wondered, sometimes, though only when it was late at night and Kelly was breathing softly next to him, sleeping the sleep of the righteous or at least the righteously exhausted, what he'd failed to do to help Justin; whether or not there was something more that he could have done, that he could have been, that could have saved him.

Those thoughts were saved for the bad nights, though, and there weren't all that many bad nights. Joey wouldn't let there be. He had too many other things to do.

"How long was Chris in love with Justin?" Kelly asked him out of the blue one night, when they were halfway through doing the dishes. Joey always insisted on doing them by hand, because it wasn't worth it to load a dishwasher with the silverware from only three people, and there was never anyone else around for meals anymore.

He turned to her, with a cheap but heavy plastic plate in one hand and a dishrag in the other, and just shook his head. "How did you know?"

"I heard. A little. That night. You shouldn't try to keep secrets from me; you know it's easier if you just talk to someone."

"They're not my secrets to tell," Joey said.

She just nodded. "They never have been," she said, and if there was a trace of rue in her eyes, well, she'd known when she married him and she'd never once faulted him for it, or at least not where he could see. Joey counted himself blessed more often than he could ever really bring himself to believe he deserved.

He'd never expected to be the first one out of all of them to settle down, to craft for himself a family this strong, this solid. He'd seen his parents, and promised himself that he'd never settle for anything less. And he hadn't; he found more. Kelly knew; she knew all of it, and she walked into it with her eyes wide open and never looked back, and sometimes Joey thought of it all like a house he'd built with his own two hands, feeling the wood taking shape underneath his fingers, strong and solid and forever. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of the day, late-afternoon sunshine spilling through their windows and striking up glints on the flecks of mica in the stone of the kitchen counter, and looked around himself, wondering when he'd grown up without noticing. He never felt old enough, not for any of it, but it was there and it was true and everything else, compared to the absolute incontrovertible reality of it all, felt pale and washed-out in comparison. This is your life, the voice in the back of his head whispered to him, and you are living it one day at a time, and no, it was never perfect, but it was more than enough.

Dead, Chris said, and missing, JC said, and Joey thought they were both right, in their own way. He missed Justin, so much it hurt, right down in the center of his chest where he breathed from on opening night when he was trying to make sure the people in the last rows of the balcony could hear him. Dead, yes; he knew. He'd known from the very beginning. But missing, too, in a way, because he could remember far back as a child, the smells of incense and flowers and funeral homes, standing around for a great-uncle or a cousin or a third cousin twice removed and the way everyone always said that dead wasn't dead as long as someone remembered.

And He will raise them up on the last day; he was a bad Catholic, such a bad Catholic, but no one could remember a Catholic funeral and not remember that much. CCD every Thursday night in old Mrs. DeLorenzo's third-floor walkup and the lines of the creed, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. He remembered rows of people, faces all turned up to the altar, lips moving in blind recitation, syllables tripping from well-trained tongues. There'd been one New Year's Eve, when he'd been sitting around with people he hadn't seen since those days back in Brooklyn, and it was a joke but it was a joke because it was true: what do you do when you get seven lapsed Catholics in a room? Get them drunk and see how fast they can recite the Creed. Joey always got stuck around the middle, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died, and was buried, and Joey always stumbled on the descended into hell part but nobody could ever forget the poetry, the rhythm, the sheer linguistic beauty of being one of a sea of voices chanting God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father. It didn't make it any more right, but it made him feel a little better, and he slipped a hundred dollar bill in the envelope of the Anglican church he and Kelly were raising Briahna in and knew, even though they were listed in the bulletin as being anonymous, that the flowers on the altar were for Justin.

"Daddy," Briahna said to him one day, six years old and already reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and Narnia before they went to bed, "where's Uncle Justin?" and he'd winced, because he'd been waiting for the question but waiting didn't make it any easier to field. He stumbled through something about how people sometimes had to go away and couldn't come back, but that didn't mean that they loved us any less, especially little girls who were the most precious thing in the world, and she'd listened to him patiently as he fumbled through it and then nodded. "He'll be back sooner than you think," she said firmly, "like Aslan was," and nothing Joey could say to her could make her change her mind.

Sometimes Joey thought she knew too, this precious life that he'd been half responsible for creating. She was one of the Fatone women. Firstborn daughter, his mother had always said, looking at her and nodding, even when she was still in diapers and booties and Joey couldn't imagine there ever being anything else. Briahna came to him sometimes, when he was sitting in the chair in the living room and humming under his breath, tracing lines of music on the score with his fingertips and trying to work the notes deep enough into his blood in time to stride out on stage and be someone else strongly enough to make it real, and crawled into his lap, like she knew when he needed her there to ground him. Lucky, lucky, he was so damn lucky, and every morning he woke up and gave thanks to the God he still wasn't sure he believed in when he saw his wife sleeping next to him. And then three became four and Joey knew that if it had been perfect before, this was something that transcended perfect and approached the realm of sublime.

Chris stopped running, even if he hadn't ever known what he was running from, and JC's fifth album spoke of healing but never forgetting, even if he didn't realize that was what it was about, and Lance remembered how to laugh, even if it was only every now and then and only for Joey's ears alone. Joey worried, sometimes, still; JC was more okay than he thought he was, but Lance was less okay than he thought he was, and Chris, well, Chris just didn't think. Joey watched them all, and sometimes his heart ached for them, because none of them could find the same sort of anchor he had, the same stability. He watched them, sometimes, when they thought he wasn't looking, and thought there but for the grace of you go I. Kelly was warm and soft and sweet beneath his hands, and he never stopped touching her with awe and wonder, and she knew when he just needed her to roll over in bed and hold him.

"Did you feel that?" Kelly asked, stopping and running her hands over her bare arms, goosebumps rising even in the late-June Orlando evening heat. She tipped her head to one side, like she was listening for something only she could hear, and her shoulders tensed again.

"Feel what?" Joey asked.

She held her head still for a minute, concentrating hard, and then shivered again and shook herself. "Goose walked over my grave," and let it go.

The phone rang. Joey had known. He'd known, he'd known the minute that the phone had rung seven long years ago, and he knew now, in that split second when his hand hovered over the receiver, before he picked it up, that he had been oh, so wrong.

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