Chapter 6

Julian's POV

The house had gone quiet by the time I stepped out onto the balcony.

Liam was passed out on the couch downstairs — I'd heard him stop talking mid-sentence somewhere around the second quarter of the game, which was honestly impressive even by his standards. Hailey and Jess had taken the pullout in the den. Outside, the storm was doing what it had been threatening to do all afternoon, working through the tree line with the kind of sustained, methodical violence that made you glad to be on the right side of a wall.

I stood under the overhang with my jacket unzipped and my phone in my hand and watched the rain hit the backyard in sheets.

She's funny, I thought.

Then I told myself to stop.

Not funny like she was trying to be — that was the thing. Chloe Bennett wasn't performing anything. She'd sat on that couch for two hours with an AP Calc textbook open in her lap, pretending to read the same page, and every time I'd glanced over she'd had this expression on her face that was so transparently, earnestly committed to the bit that it had taken real effort not to smile. She'd said helps with retention with a completely straight face and then clearly wanted to dissolve into the floor the second she heard herself, and there was something about that — about the way she'd doubled down instead of laughing it off — that was genuinely, inconveniently charming.

Don't, I told myself again, more firmly this time.

She was seventeen. She was Liam's little sister. Those were two separate and entirely sufficient reasons, and if I needed a third, I could add the obvious one: I was not the kind of person who should be anywhere near someone like her.

I knew exactly what I was. I'd had that particular conversation with myself enough times to be past the part where it required any real examination. I was good at the beginning of things — the first few weeks, when everything was still surface-level and nobody had expectations yet. I was significantly less good at what came after. The slow withdrawal, the managed distance, the way I could make someone feel like they were imagining the whole thing. I wasn't proud of it. I just understood it as a fact about myself, the same way I understood that I was good at math and bad at sleeping.

Chloe had looked at me like I was something worth cataloguing. Careful, precise, trying to be subtle about it and not quite succeeding. I was used to being looked at. I was not used to it feeling like that — like being seen by someone who was actually paying attention and would remember the details later.

She'd flinched when Jess laughed too loud. She'd pulled her sleeves down when she thought nobody was watching. She'd looked at Hailey's stomach and then looked at her own hands, and I'd seen all of it, every small quiet thing, and I had absolutely no business having seen any of it.

She's seventeen, I reminded myself. She's Liam's sister. You don't know how to do whatever she'd want from you. You'd make a mess of it, and she'd be the one standing in it afterward.

I was good at math. I could do this particular calculation in my sleep. The answer came out the same every time, clear and unambiguous, the kind of answer you didn't have to check twice.

She was not a beginning-of-things kind of girl. You could see that from twenty feet away. She paid attention to everything — catalogued the small stuff, filed it away, came back to it later. The kind of girl who, if you were careless with her, would carry it around for a long time afterward.

I was almost always careless.

My phone buzzed.

I looked at the screen. My father's name.

I stood there for three full seconds watching it ring, rain dripping off the overhang six inches from my face, and then I picked up.

"Hey," I said.

"Julian." My father's voice had that particular cadence — clipped, efficient, the voice of a man who scheduled calls and expected them to start on time and on topic. "I've been trying to reach you."

"I know. There's a storm situation. I'm at a friend's in Oakhaven."

"I'm aware there's a storm. I'm calling because your grandmother is expecting you for Thanksgiving. We've discussed this."

"We've discussed it," I said, "and I told you I wasn't coming."

"You told me you'd think about it."

"That was me being polite." I watched the oak at the far edge of the yard bend sideways in the wind, branches dragging. "I'm not coming to Boston to sit through four hours of you and those lawyers making passive-aggressive small talk while Grandmother asks me when I'm joining the firm. I'm not doing that."

"We are handling things civilly—"

"Dad." I said it the way you said a word you were tired of. "Come on."

A pause. The kind that was doing a lot of work.

"The estate matters require your involvement eventually. You understand that."

"Eventually isn't Thanksgiving."

"Your grandmother is seventy-eight years old—"

"And she'll be seventy-eight at Christmas too." I kept my voice flat. This was the thing about my father — he could make a family holiday sound like a deposition, and he did it without any awareness that he was doing it, because to him there was no real distinction between the two. "I'll see her at Christmas if the roads are clear. Right now I'm staying here."

Another pause. Longer.

"You're making this more difficult than it needs to be," he said.

I laughed. It came out short and without much in it. "Yeah," I said. "I know. Good night, Dad."

I hung up before he could respond.

I stood there for a moment with the phone in my hand, rain loud against the overhang, and felt the familiar thing settle into my chest. Not anger exactly. More like a specific kind of tired — the kind that came from conversations that had been happening in the same shape for so long they'd worn grooves into you. Every call home was its own little performance of the same argument, and the worst part wasn't the argument. It was that it still got in, every time, like water finding the same crack.

I was about to go back inside when I heard it.

Movement. From inside the room.

I turned. Through the glass door, in the dim light from the hallway, I could see a figure standing just inside the threshold. Hailey. She'd changed out of the Blackwood hoodie and was in a thin sleep shirt now, hair down, and she was looking at me through the glass with an expression I recognized immediately.

I opened the door.

"Hey," she said. Her voice was soft, calibrated for quiet. "I couldn't sleep."

"Storm's loud."

"Yeah." She didn't move from the doorway. "I saw your light was still on."

I looked at her. She was pretty — objectively, straightforwardly pretty — and she'd been making it clear since the moment she walked through the front door that she was interested.

The math was simple enough. No history, no complications, no morning-after conversation that lasted longer than it needed to. Just one night, straightforward as it gets.

She took a step toward me.