Family is Everything to Alan Ferguson. Which was evident when he ran away from the Chiricahua Children's Home at the age of ten in search of his family. People who looked like him. Born to an interracial couple, he didn't meet many people who did. He was only twelve when he met the boy on a leisurely fishing outing one summer day. He was immediately drawn to him. So much so that he left the good people who took him in and their beautiful home to live under a railroad trestle just to be near him. He didn't understand it. The Marshalls were good to him. The boy looked nothing like him. But something about him felt right. Alan knew he had to get back to Rob Barlow. It was an unexplainable love at first sight for the boys that started a relationship that lasted an entire lifetime. They became inseparable even through Alan's torment of being bullied at school where he was branded a
Trussel Rat,
a forbidden love that left him devastated when his first and only love, Michell Peterson was suddenly ripped away from him, and a horrific heartbreaking tragedy that caused Rob to become a broken man for the next twenty-six years, the death of his beloved Becky. The one thing they knew they would always have is each other. Together they would conquer and not be conquered.