He scoffed again, but as his gaze drifted back to mine, the fight started to drain out of him. I saw it in the way his shoulders slumped.
“I’m not ready for you to leave,” he said after a long pause, his voice wobbling slightly at the edges. “You’re the only one who’s been here. The only constant I’ve had. Maybe if you guys had been dating for a long time and I knew it was coming, it would’ve been different, but now, you’re just gone.”
My throat tightened. “I’m not leaving you. I might move out eventually, yeah. That part might change, but nothing else between us has to. I’m still your sister. I’m still here. I still show up. That doesn’t stop just because I’m married.”
He stood up, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie. The anger I’d been bracing for wasn’t there anymore, but what was left behind was quieter. Heavier. Sad.
I think I preferred it when he was pissed off at me.
“I hear you,” he said finally, but his voice didn’t sound like belief. It sounded like resignation. “I just don’t think you see it.”
“See what?” I asked.
“That it already has changed, Jane,” he said, and then he walked past me and he was gone before I could figure out how to stop him.
The front door shut with a soft click that seemed to echo through the house, and I sat there with my heart aching and my thoughts spiraling. But what hurt the most was that he wasn’t wrong. Everything really was changing.
I was barely home anymore. When I was, I was distracted, on the phone with Alex, talking about Alex, fighting for Thayer… with Alex.
My life had narrowed down to two gravitational pulls—my husband and the company. Everything else orbited around them or got shoved out of the way.
Meanwhile, Wyatt was applying to college, filling out forms at the dining-room table where I used to sit and help with his homework. Soon he’d be gone too, off to start a life that didn’t include me hovering in the background making sure the house stayed standing.
That change was coming whether any of us liked it or not.
Maybe that was what he was really reacting to. Not Alex or our marriage, but the realization that the ground under his feet wasn’t stable anymore.Welcome to adulthood, kid.
Fear had a way of disguising itself as anger and Wyatt was going through a lot. I pressed my palms into my eyes, the article flickering at the back of my mind again now that my brother was gone. That image of Mallory’s hand on Alex’s haunted me so much more now for having realized how much my life had started revolving around him.
I still hadn’t listened to any of the voicemails he’d left or answered his calls. I hadn’t read a single one of his texts either, and I felt awful about it.
Alex didn’t deserve the silent treatment. He’d done nothing but show up for me, over and over again, steady and unflinching. But right now, every time my phone buzzed, it felt like one more demand on a system that was already overloaded.
I just needed a fucking minute.
The house felt too quiet without any of my brothers in it. Too big. Too full of echoes from other versions of our lives when Dad’s laughter had still sometimes come down the hall and Mom called for us to come down for dinner.
Everything used to feel simpler, even when it had been so much harder after Dad had gone away. It was then that I realized how much more intensely Wyatt had to be feeling all the changes. I’d been so self-centered recently—or Alex-centered, rather.
I’d told myself I was allowed to want something for myself for once. That I’d earned it. That loving Alex didn’t make me selfish but that it made me human.
All of that was still true, but so was the fact that somewhere along the way, I’d stopped checking in as closely as I used to. I’d assumed Wyatt would adjust because I always had. I’d underestimated how scary it must be to watch the one constant in your life start to shift.
I didn’t know how to fix that. I didn’t know how to split myself into the right shapes to be everything everyone needed at the same time.
My phone buzzed again in my hand.
Alex.
I stared at his name on the screen until it went dark, letting it ring out and go to voicemail. Guilt followed immediately, but I shoved it down. If I answered him right now, I’d either cry or say something I didn’t mean or demand reassurance I wasn’t ready to hear yet.
I needed space to think. To breathe.
To not be pulled in ten different directions at once.
My fingers trembled as I looked at my phone, knowing Mallory’s number was in there somewhere. At one point, I’d been helping the lawyers try to track her down for the DNA test of Court Jr.
My heart started racing, adrenaline spiking in a way that felt unhinged and impulsive. I stared at the phone, her number representing answers I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
