Shane and Ryan dropped me off at the house not long after he’d gotten his baggage. As much as I’d missed him, I was tired, and was really looking forward to spending a night alone at the house. I told Ryan we’d need to have dinner to catch up at some point soon. He agreed and said he’d come by to see Alice the next day after she was done with her physical therapy.

Over the years he’d wound up spending a lot of time with me. He was really interested in tennis when he moved in with Shane and Jenny, although he didn’t play due to a slight limp from having an underdeveloped bone in his right leg. We’d gotten pretty close over the years since he’d often come over to watch matches and tournaments with me. Sometimes Alice and I had everyone over for those and it became a sort of dinner party atmosphere, but a lot of the time it was just us and the kids, with Ryan sitting in. None of my family ever cared quite as much as he did, though.

He wasn’t a bad kid by any means, but he’d been kicked out of several of his previous foster homes for getting into some fights at school. It really wasn’t anything big to listen to Shane tell it, but then again, with her history the kid might have knocked twenty seven kids unconscious or something. I can’t really say because I have no idea on the details and never thought to ask him about it. I just knew he’d been in fights for his limp. His right leg was noticeably smaller than his left, and while he wasn’t exactly disabled, I could see where it would give him trouble, especially with the other kids.

To add to that, he was biracial. That was in style with most parents by the time he came to live with Shane and Jenny, but it was completely different on the schoolyard and he didn’t have the easiest time of it. Still, he seemed to be fairly respectful of Shane and Jenny and aside from a few minor scuffles he was pretty well behaved from the day he got there. A few years after his adoption he’d told me that from the second he’d stepped into the room Shane had built onto the back of the house for him he’d felt like he was at home, so he tried his best not to mess it up.