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Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

T he room is spinning, like it often does when Xana has had one too many White Claws, which she has today, out on the lake.

She falls flat on her face. Feels the pain immediately.

She looks in the mirror. She’s chipped her front tooth.

Damn. She turns to Emily. She’s upset. And not because it’s going to cost money to fix the tooth.

“I don’t want to be this person anymore,” she tells her understanding friend.

Xana is well aware of her reputation as the free-spirited girl in their core friend group: Xana and Ethan, Emily, Hunter Johnson, Josie, Linden, Peter Elgorriaga, and Ethan’s triplet siblings, Hunter and Maizie.

But she wants to change that. Xana wants to grow up. She wants to be someone who fits into the world of Ethan and his parents. The Chapin family is fun, easygoing, but as Xana has seen, their life is different from her hardscrabble existence in her dad’s basement.

At Priest Lake, the Chapins all play golf on the local course. Xana has never played golf, but the Chapin triplets are really good. They love it, like they love all sports.

When Xana first joined them on the course, she found that hitting a golf ball was harder than it looked; out of mockery for their passion, she threw a club—then took a swig of her drink. Everyone laughed.

As Karen Alandt—Mama Karen—has noticed, Xana “is someone who is prepared to make a total fool of herself in public if it will put someone else at ease.” But Xana doesn’t want to be the butt of everyone’s jokes forever.

She never thought about the future before. But now she does. She wants to become a person who is taken more seriously.

And she wants to grow old with Ethan.