When I’m over her, I keep my weight on my forearms. I keep my mouth on her mouth. I make the rhythm a conversation, not a demand. Soft. Slow. Then slower. She holds the back of my neck and drags me closer and I go because there is nothing I will ever refuse her in a bed when she asks like that. She comes with her eyes on mine, not a scream this time, but a quiet breaking shudder that I feel all the way down my spine. I follow with my jaw pressed to her shoulder, the place I always hide so no one else gets to see me this undone.
After, I don’t roll away. I gather her closer and breathe her hair. I let the quiet do the thing it’s supposed to do. I count five heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. I let myself pretend I can keep this.
I can’t.
“Phoenix.” My voice doesn’t want to cooperate. I make it.
She shifts, sleepy and smiling. “Hmm?”
“I have to tell you something.”
She opens her eyes and braces without realizing she’s doing it, her fingers slipping down to tap against her thigh. I cover her hand, stilling the motion.
“What is it?” she asks.
“My father.” I swallow. My mouth tastes like metal and mint. “He was the one who broke us up when we were the kids. The one who sent the messages.”
“What? Why?” She sits up a little, sheet sliding. “Why does he hate me so much?”
My chest stutters. I say it because leaving it unsaid is worse than the blow.
“He needed to keep us apart. He said… he said you’re his daughter.” The words come out rough and wrong. “He said you’re a Masterson.”
Her face empties. No dramatics. It’s a clean wipe, like she didn’t hear me right and her brain is trying to reload the sentence. “No,” she says, flat. Then again, like maybe repetition will change it: “No.”
“I didn’t want to say it like this,” I manage. “I wanted to find a better way. There isn’t one.”
She pushes back from me, sheet clutched to her chest with one fist. She’s breathing too fast. Her mouth opens and stays that way because there’s no room for anything else to come through it.
“He’s lying,” she says, but it’s not conviction. It’s a plea.
“I hope he did,” I say. “I hope there’s a test that tells us he was trying to break me one last way. We’ll do it. We’ll do all of it. But I can’t let you not know tonight. I can’t touch you again without you knowing what he said.”
Silence. The house makes a faraway sound, like someone closing a cabinet three rooms away. The river is a faint rush through the window. My heart bats itself stupid against my ribs.
“But you just…we just—” She motions to the bed. A tear trickles down her cheek, and all I see is devastation.
I stand. I can’t stay in the bed while her world tilts. I reach for my shirt on the floor and don’t pull it on. I leave it there for her because I can’t take it off her twice. At the doorway, I look back.
She’s still sitting up, sheet pulled tight, hair falling, eyes wide and seeing nothing, mouth open around a word that hasn’tfound its shape. It looks like a film still, the moment before the cut to something else that will hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s not enough. It’s all I have.
I walk out before I take the choice away from her again.
27
Phoenix
Conrad fucking left me.No. It’s worse than that…Conrad left all of us.
The house tells on him before anyone else has a chance. The chair outside my room is empty, the book he was pretending to read left open face down like he gave up. His mug is washed and drying on the rack. His cologne is a faint ghost in the hallway that gets lost halfway to the stairs.
There are no slammed doors. No rumble of the SUV. Just absence that feels like a missing stair you only notice when the world drops out from under you and you have no idea if you’ll land in six inches or six feet down.
I sit on the bed and stare at the dent my body made in the pillow, waiting for a sentence to form. It doesn’t come. I put on the shirt he left on the floor because it smells like him, and then I walk barefoot down the hall and prepare to be the grenade in my own living room.
They’re there already—Atticus at the end of the dining table with the map, Storm leaning on the doorjamb like it owes him rent,Maverick pacing a slow figure eight that keeps taking him past the coffee pot and back to me. Spencer’s in the corner chair with his reading glasses on his head, looking like he’s been a father long enough to recognize the sound of a bad morning before anyone says a word.
