"He's secretly a rabbit. Didn't want me to tell you, but you're old enough to know about Thumper now." Thumper would be giving him a look for this conversation, but Elisha was fairly sure that that would be tempered by the sight of he and Ty not arguing. Oddly, he'd been better at handling the relationship when he'd been a moody teenager.

It was once they were all adults that things got rough.

"You can throw together a salad to keep him happy," Elisha said with a nod before he pushed himself to his feet. Then he paused, though. "Ty," he said, "it's unusual to have a friend who went through something similar to you and who's suffering the same sort of thing. Carlos going to need someone who gets it." Gael was a nice kid, Elisha thought; weirdly so considering his parents, who were different degrees of sharp, but he wasn't going to get it. Not all the time.