No, I don’t let things go. Not with her. Not ever. Sixteen-year-old Parker hid her journal with a dollar-store padlock. It took me thirty seconds and a paperclip to open it. I read it on my back on the dock while the boards warmed my shoulders, and her swim practice whistle blew in the distance. Ryan Matthews. The feeling of being invisible in her own house. The way she wanted to be seen as more than Charlie’s little sister. I read things I had no right to read and memorized all of it like a prayer.
It didn’t stop there. The romance paperbacks wedged under her mattress. The browser history, she thought, she cleared. Every boy who looked at her twice. I solved each one like a problem set. Not with fists. With pressure. Ryan’s family transferred that summer. Jason Park found a new obsession two towns over. Ryan Matthews—the one Jace carried her away from on graduation night—suddenly discovered an out-of-state scholarship that didn’t exist until it did.
I couldn’t have her. Silas couldn’t have her. Jace couldn’t have her. So no one else would either.
When she left, I didn’t stop. I moved the surveillance to a safer distance, the kind that leaves no fingerprints. I’m the fixer. The man in the systems. Dating apps bend if you know where the code lives. Reservations get lost. Tires go flat. Wrong turns multiply like rabbits. If someone wanted Parker Carter from three thousand miles away, they had to work for it. Prove themselves. None of them did.
I shouldn’t have done it. Probably. I won’t tell her. Definitely. I call it quality control because the truth is uglier, and it’s mine.
“You’re doing it now,” she says, pulling me back into the room. Her voice has cooled, not by much. “Watching. Analyzing. Like I’m something to solve.”
“Maybe you are.”
“I’m not.” She crosses her arms in a mirror of me, chin up, sweat gleaming along the curve of her throat. “I’m a person. A grown woman. I make my own choices, and I don’t need you or your brothers tracking my shadow.”
“Grown woman.” I let the words turn over on my tongue and take my time letting my gaze drift down and back up. Not crude. Thorough. “I noticed.”
Color deepens along her cheekbones. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re cataloging me.”
“Maybe I am.” I push off the chair and stand, and she doesn’t retreat. “You’ve changed, angel. Can’t fault a man for noticing.”
“Yes, I can.” The fight doesn’t leave her voice, but it softens at the edges into something more dangerous. “I can blame all of you. You and Silas and Jace and Charles. You never let me grow up. You never let me make my own mistakes. You hovered, intervened, treated me like glass.”
“We were protecting you.”
“I didn’t ask to be protected.” The words spill raw. “I wanted to be normal. Go to parties. Kiss a boy without one of you grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me home. But I couldn’t, because you all decided I needed supervision.”
“Because you were reckless.”
“I was seventeen.”
“Exactly.” I step closer. The AC hums, steady and indifferent. “Seventeen and hopping fences in a skirt, sneaking into houses where men twice your size watched you like a dare, drinking things you didn’t see poured. Someone had to watch you.”
“No onehadto do anything.” Her hands curl at her sides, knuckles pale. “You chose it. And then you acted surprised when I left and didn’t look back.”
“You think we were surprised?” It comes out harder than I intended. “We knew you’d run. The second you could, you would. That’s why?—”
I stop. The words are a cliff, and there’s no safe way down.
“That’s why what?” She’s so close now I can count the gold flecks in her brown eyes. Her shampoo is floral and clean under the salt and studio sweat, and it makes something in my chest go tight. “Say it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
We’re too close. If I reached out, I could put my fingers under her jaw and tilt her face up and end six years of pretending I didn’t want to. I step back instead because I still have a line, and I’m not crossing it first.
“The only reason I came back,” she says, voice thick with something I can’t yet name, “is for Charles and Sienna’s wedding. I’m here a week, then I’m gone. Back to my life. My job. My world thatdoesn’tinclude you or your brothers or anyone on this island.”
“Your world.” I taste the bitterness of it. “The one with a magazine that requires sex toys in your luggage.”
“Yes.” Her chin lifts. Defiant. “Myworld. Where I get to make choices and have experiences and be an adult instead of a child you all need to protect.”
“We never thought you were a child.”
