Chapter 1 The Wrong Kind of First

Wren's POV

The keyboard is the first thing I hate about him.

Not because it is ugly. It is actually kind of beautiful, all black and clean, tucked under his arm like he would drop everything else before he dropped that. The movers are carrying boxes, lamps, a whole dresser wrapped in plastic, and this boy I have never met in my life walks past all of it carrying nothing but that keyboard, like the rest of his world does not matter.

I am watching from the top of the stairs when he comes through the front door.

He is tall. Dark hair that needs a cut. A jaw that looks like it was designed to make people feel stupid for noticing it. He is wearing a gray shirt with a small tear near the collar, and he does not look nervous at all, which I hate most of all, because my hands have been shaking since six this morning.

My mother is standing in the doorway, glowing like it is Christmas. She has been glowing for three weeks straight. Ever since she said Wren, I need to tell you something, and then told me that the man she has been dating for eight months has a son, and that they are getting married, and that the son is my age, and that they are moving in this Saturday.

This Saturday was supposed to be four months away.

Four months became three. Then six weeks. Then my mother knocked on my door last Tuesday and said, " Sweetheart, it's going to be this weekend, and I smiled and said, " Okay, " and closed my door and sat on my floor for forty minutes.

I have been smiling and saying okay for three weeks.

I am done now.

He looks up.

I do not know why. I have not made a sound. But his eyes go straight to the top of the stairs like he already knew I was there, and for one second, we just look at each other. His expression does not change. No smile. No wave. No, hi, I am your new stepbrother. Sorry about your life. Just this flat, direct look, like he is reading something written on my face and does not like what it says.

I look away first. I hate that I look away first.

Dinner is the worst twenty-three minutes of my year.

Our parents sit across from each other, talking too loudly about the new neighborhood, the school schedule, the garage space, and the grocery situation. His dad, Soren, keeps touching my mother's hand. She keeps laughing at things that are not that funny. I watch my plate. I move my food around. Beside me, close enough that I could touch him if I leaned two inches left, Declan does the same thing.

We have not spoken one word to each other.

His dad says, " So you two are going to be at the same school, that is exciting, right and I say yes at the same moment Declan says, " Sure, " and our voices land on top of each other and then drop dead.

My mother fills the silence immediately, talking about Hartwell's arts program, about my content channel, about my follower count, as if it is a personality trait. I want to dissolve into the floor. I can feel Declan not looking at me the same way. I can feel a bruise without touching it.

When I stand to clear my plate, no one stops me.

I am three steps up the stairs when I hear him.

His voice is low, not meant to travel. He thinks I am already gone. He says it to the table or the wall or no one at all, just quietly, like something he cannot hold in anymore.

"This was a mistake."

I stop walking.

My hand is on the railing. My chest does something sharp and stupid. Because I have been thinking those exact words since six this morning and hearing them out loud from him, this stranger in my house with his keyboard and his torn collar, it does not make me feel better.

It makes it worse.

I go to my room. I lock the door. I set up my camera on the desk the way I always do when I need to process something, red light blinking, recording, and I talk. I talk about the moving truck and the keyboard and the twenty-three minutes and the way he looked at me at the top of the stairs like I was already a problem he was tired of solving. I talk about how my mother looked so happy that it scared me. I talk about how his voice sounded when he said it was a mistake, not angry, just certain, like a person who has already been through too much to pretend.

I talked for eleven minutes.

Then I stop.

Rewind.

Watch myself.

I look terrified.

I deleted the whole thing.

I am almost asleep when I hear it.

Through the wall between our rooms, soft enough that I almost miss it, the first few notes of something slow and unfinished. He is playing. At eleven-thirty on a Saturday night in a house he just moved into, while his dad and my mom are probably still downstairs talking too loudly, he is sitting in the dark playing his keyboard with the volume turned almost all the way down.

I lie completely still and listen.

It is not a song I know. It does not sound like a song at all, yet more like a question with no answer, the same four bars repeating, changing each time slightly, like he is looking for something and has not found it.

It is the most honest thing I have heard all day.

I press my hand flat against the wall between us.

Then I hear him stop.

I hear the soft sound of a drawer opening. Papers moving. A pen clicking.

Then silence.

I pull my hand back fast. My phone lights up on the nightstand. A notification. I reach for it without thinking.

It is from the Hartwell gossip account.

The account that posts about everyone at school, the one with four thousand followers, the one that has never once mentioned my name without asking first.

The post is a photo.

Of me.

Of him.

From tonight. Leaving the same front door of the same party at the same second, his jacket half across my shoulder from the rain, both of us caught mid-step, looking like something we are absolutely not.

The caption reads: new girl, new boy, new story, who saw this coming?

Forty-seven comments.

I sit up in bed.

The number changes while I am looking at it.

Forty-eight.

Forty-nine.

Fifty-two.