When we arrived, I reminded them that my sister is fucking off-limits.
Actually, it’s not just him who looks at her like she’s the embodiment of perfection.Nope, it’s also Barret.Fucking Barret with his broody, long-lost poet energy, and quiet awe, like she’s a melody he hasn’t quite learned how to play.
They better stay away from her, or I will break both of them if they even try to touch her.My little sister is off-limits.Also ...I think the two of them are back together, which adds another layer of what the fuck is going on here that I never understood, and they didn’t care to explain.
“No news is bad,” Cleo says after a long pause, her voice trembling under a forced calm.She keeps her eyes on the chipped rim of her coffee mug like it holds some hidden answer.“What if something happened to him?”
I exhale through my nose and push my palms against the table, grounding myself before my frustration tips into panic.“Like I said, ask Eddie to call his guy.They can track any card activity, right?”
Her shoulders rise, tense and small.She shrugs, but it’s not nonchalant—it’s defeat dressed up as uncertainty.“Do you think he’s using again?”
Fuck, I’m not ready to go there with her.She should be talking to someone who’s less fucked up than me.Though maybe she needs to hear it from me.
“Who knows, Cleo?Our father is an addict, and our first agent made damn sure we were introduced to every fucking vice in the industry.”I scrub my face with both hands.“Booze, drugs, women ...he made sure that we got hooked on all of them.”
I pause.Let the silence stretch.Let the truth sting.
“However,” I continue, “he’s been clean for five years.”
Cleo bites her lip, as if she’s trying to chew away the doubt.“Yeah, but ...”
Her voice trails off into the space between us, and the silence that follows isn’t hollow—it’s saturated with years.Years of broken promises and missed holidays, forgotten birthdays, and fractured moments that should’ve meant something.
This silence carries grief in all its disguises—anger, guilt, resentment, and love bent out of shape.It’s fucked up, sure, but beneath all of that, there’s something deeper.Something raw and unfinished that still pulses between us.
“I’m sorry.”
She blinks, like she misheard me.
“For?”she asks, voice brittle.
I swallow.The lump in my throat tastes like regret.Like tour buses, backstage fights, and nights I don’t remember, but I was absent from her life.
“For all of it,” I say, quietly.“For the years I was high and drunk and unreachable.For the phone calls I didn’t answer.For every time you needed your brother, and I was too fucked up to show up.For making you feel like you had to be the responsible one when you were still just a kid.”
Her eyes go glassy, but she doesn’t look away.
“I should’ve protected you,” I continue, voice cracking under the truth of it.“Instead, I was absent and ...made you feel like you weren’t important.”
She nods once—small, shaky.
“Thank you for not dying.”She glances toward the door.“I just don’t want to lose any of you.Not even Alfie, who keeps ignoring us.”
“He’ll come back around.We all do,” I say almost like a promise, but honestly, I’m not sure if he’ll ever speak to us again.
Sure, it seems like it’s the girlfriend’s fault.But what if he has realized that we’re terrible for his emotional sanity and he’s just trying to keep himself safe?I won’t say that out loud.Not until we know where Julian is.Then, maybe we can start becoming a family again.
ChapterEighty-Seven
Roderick
July 27th, 1997
Rhodes is out on the terrace, cigarette lit, pacing like he’s trying to outrun a past he has already lived.
His shoulders tense every time he brings the cigarette to his mouth.The glow flares, disappears.Repeat.He’s unraveling in real time, and I hate how familiar it looks—how much of that unraveling used to be because of me.
I should turn around and pretend I don’t see him the same way he’s been pretending I don’t exist since we arrived.
