It’s early January. Cold enough that the window glass feels like a warning when I brush my knuckles against it. The kind of morning that should mean a new semester, new routines, basketball and weight room and syllabi and normal.
Normal is a joke.
I step out into the hallway anyway because routines are safe, and routines don’t ask questions. I aim straight for the kitchen because coffee is a task, and tasks are where feelings go to die.
Then I hear movement—not from Pops’s room, not from Cameron’s empty one, but from the living room.
A shift. A soft clink. The sound of someone existing quietly in a space they don’t want to disturb.
My stomach drops before my eyes even make the turn.
Logan.
He’s on the couch with his leg propped on a pillow, brace strapped on like a second skin, hair a mess like he didn’t sleep either. The TV is off. His phone is in his hand, but he isn’t scrolling. He’s just staring at the blank screen like he’s waiting for it to tell him what to do next.
For a second, neither of us moves.
It’s too early for a fight. Too early for a conversation. Too early for whatever we did last night to have consequences in the daylight.
His gaze lifts to mine, and it isn’t smug. It isn’t victorious. It isn’t sharp.
It’s careful.
Like he’s afraid one wrong breath will send me running.
“Morning,” he says softly.
My throat closes.
I should say it back. I should act normal.
So I do what I always do when normal starts slipping.
I sharpen.
“Don’t,” I say, voice flat.
His brow furrows. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t talk to me like…” I cut myself off because even sayinglike last night happenedfeels too big to fit in the room. I swallow hard, force the words into something smaller. Something safer. “Like you’re allowed to be nice.”
Something tight crosses his face, pain, maybe, or patience. He looks away for half a second, like he’s swallowing something.
“I’m not trying to be nice,” he says quietly. “I’m just?—”
“Existing?” I snap.
His eyes flick back to mine, and something in them darkens, not anger—something worse. Something honest.
“Yeah,” he says. “Existing.”
The silence that follows is thick, weighted. The kind that presses against your ribs until you either speak or break.
From down the hall, Pops coughs—soft, rough, too familiar.
My body reacts before my mind does. I’m already moving, already scanning the sound, already calculating whether it’s deeper than yesterday’s. Whether it lingered too long.
Logan watches me do it.
