Crew Devillier and Tucker Powell are cousins

The relationship between Crew Devillier and Tucker Powell is the book’s clearest example of cousins functioning as brothers. Born only a few weeks apart, they grow up in constant proximity within the Powell family’s extended household system, sharing childhood, sport, teasing, games, and family ceremonies. Their closeness gives Crew a stable peer bond after Hayden Devillier leaves touring to raise him, while it also shows how Ryan Powell, Peri Powell, and their wider circle turn kinship into a daily form of care.

Identity and Family Structure

Crew Devillier and Tucker Powell are first cousins, but their relationship is shaped by circumstances that make the distinction between cousin and sibling unusually thin. Peri Powell explains that Tucker is the older boy and that the two are only a few weeks apart in age. Their near-simultaneous childhood creates a built-in companion for each of them: neither has to cross a large age gap to find a playmate, rival, or confidant.

Their upbringing is also deliberately collective. Crew and Hayden Devillier initially live with Ryan and Peri, whose house has two master areas so the adults can maintain separate sections while remaining close enough to care for the boys. Hayden later clarifies that the arrangement was not simply a matter of avoiding the Powell household’s noise after Ryan and Peri had more children. He earned enough money to establish a separate home, but the families arranged their living situation so everyone could remain available to help raise the boys. The physical movement from shared household to nearby separate home therefore changes their domestic arrangement without severing the cousins’ everyday connection.

Shared Childhood and Daily Companionship

The boys’ closeness is visible in ordinary exchanges rather than in a single dramatic declaration. Tucker jokes with Hayden about Crew’s ability to manipulate his father into bringing food upstairs while Crew is sick, and Peri immediately answers by comparing Tucker’s own behavior with his father. The teasing places both boys inside the same affectionate family language: each can be mocked because each is securely included, and the adults recognize their childish demands as part of ordinary family life rather than as a threat to family authority.

Their bond also survives the family’s changing size. Once Ryan and Peri have two more children, Crew and Hayden move out of the main household, but the cousins remain close. Later, after Crew’s football game, Crew and Tucker leave together and head upstairs to play a new Nintendo game, laughing as Teagan follows them. Timbre Simons watches them disappear around the corner and observes that they are fortunate to have each other, comparing their connection to having a twin without living in the same house. The comparison captures the relationship’s defining balance: their lives are not identical, but their proximity has made companionship feel almost constant.

Sport, Loyalty, and Mutual Recognition

Football provides the relationship with a public dimension. At Crew’s game, Tucker stands beside him when Crew celebrates recovering his first fumble, a play that prevents the opposing team from scoring the winning touchdown. Hayden praises the play and tells Crew that the coach may remember it when spring training begins. Crew shares the moment with both Hayden and Tucker, high-fiving them before the group leaves, so Tucker is present not merely as a spectator but as one of the people whose recognition matters to Crew.

Tucker’s presence also helps define Crew’s place in the family’s younger generation. The boys are close enough in age to occupy the same social and athletic world, yet their relationship is not reduced to competition. Crew’s later thanks to Timbre for attending the game, followed by his enthusiastic embrace of her, occurs with Tucker nearby and reinforces how easily Tucker is incorporated into Crew’s emerging family life. The cousin relationship becomes a bridge between Hayden’s established family and Timbre’s acceptance into it.

Role in the Wider Family System

The cousins’ bond is part of a larger caregiving network rather than an isolated childhood friendship. Hayden quits touring after Crew’s birth and builds his work around the boy’s needs, writing music for bands and working as a studio musician at 13 Recordings. Because Hayden is Crew’s sole parent, the Powell family’s closeness gives Crew an additional layer of continuity. Shared residence, nearby homes, meals, games, and attendance at important events make Tucker a recurring presence in the life Hayden has reorganized around his son.

The adults’ attitudes further protect the boys’ connection. Assured Distraction functions as family in Austin, and Ryan and Peri’s household remains a place where Crew can participate in a larger group even after Hayden establishes an independent home. Hayden’s insistence that Crew is his number-one priority is therefore supported, not contradicted, by the extended family: parental responsibility stays centered on Hayden, while everyday belonging is distributed across the Powell household and the band’s chosen-family circle.

Crew’s maturity also contributes to the family’s emotional movement. When Hayden worries that Timbre might reject the family’s help and later leave, Crew argues that she needs to learn what real friends are and that refusing to try could hurt more than risking disappointment. Although this exchange concerns Timbre rather than Tucker directly, Tucker belongs to the same secure family environment that enables Crew to think in terms of loyalty, inclusion, and shared risk. The cousins’ relationship is consequently one expression of a broader family ethic in which children are not peripheral to decisions about belonging.

Continuity and Narrative Significance

The relationship remains important because it gives Crew a form of family continuity that Hayden cannot provide alone. It begins in shared housing and near-matched age, develops through teasing, sport, gaming, and routine presence, and endures after the households separate. The later family gathering at which Hayden asks Timbre to become his wife and Crew’s mother places Crew at the center of a newly formalized household, but the surrounding celebration still includes the extended network that helped shape him, including the cousin who grew up almost as his twin.

Crew Devillier and Tucker Powell’s relationship thus embodies the novel’s idea of chosen and extended family without erasing biological kinship. They are biologically cousins, domestically once close to siblings, and emotionally strengthened by a system in which adults remain available and children grow together. Their bond makes family appear not as a fixed household boundary but as a repeated practice of showing up—for meals, illness, football, games, difficult conversations, and celebrations. That ordinary reliability is the relationship’s decisive significance.