“Little brother.” Declan’s tone said he was about to enjoy himself at my expense. “The internet is losing its mind about you.”
“I don’t have internet access. That’s the point of being locked in a televised prison.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a clip of you at the cooking challenge with four million views. There’s a fan account called ’PieDaddy.’” He was grinning through the phone — I could hear it, the exact quality of amusement only an older brother could produce. “Twitter is calling it ’the most romantic thing ever broadcast,’ and someone made an edit set to Gracie Abrams. You’d hate it. I’ve watched it eleven times.”
“The internet needs a more proportionate response to baked goods.”
“There’s a tweet that just says ’THE WAY HE WATCHES HER TAKE THE FIRST BITE’ in all caps with forty thousand likes. You’ve gone viral, Rhys. My little brother. Viral for feelings.” The glee in his voice was indecent. “Mom would be so proud. Dad would need a drink.”
The mention of Dad landed quietly, how it always did between us — a small detonation disguised as a joke. We’d learned that trick from him, actually. Disguising everything as something else.
“Rhys.” His voice dropped to a lower register — the one he used for serious things, the frequency that meant the teasing was over. “What’s going on with you and this woman?”
“Nothing.”
“You made her grandmother’s apple pie from memory.”
“I have a good memory. It’s not a character flaw.”
“It is when you use it to bake pies for women you claim not to care about.” A pause. “I talked to Mason.”
My spine straightened. “Mason called you?”
“We’re Instagram friends, apparently. He DMed me. Said he was ’concerned about my emotional wellbeing,’ which is hilarious from a guy who cried during a pizza commercial last week.” Declan paused. “He said you came back from the garden looking like someone had taken you apart and reassembled you wrong.”
“Mason has a flair for the dramatic.”
“Mason has eyes, Rhys.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re doing the thing.”
“I don’t have a thing.”
“You’ve had it since you were eight years old and Dad told you that crying was for women and you decided the safest move was never feeling anything again.” His voice was quiet now — gentle-brutal, the honesty only Declan could deploy without it feeling like an attack. “You get mean when you’re scared. You’ve been mean to her since day one. You are terrified.”
The word landed like a controlled demolition — an impact that doesn’t just cause damage but reveals what was already rotting underneath. I thought about the first night: she’d stepped into the light in that crown and her eyes had found mine across a room full of men performing for her, and a tension behind my ribs had said oh no with the certainty of an engineer spotting a flaw before the tests come back.
“I’m not mean.” I pressed my palm against the balcony railing until the cold iron bit. “I’m careful.”
“You’re mean, little brother. And that you can’t tell the difference is exactly why I signed you up for this show.”
He said “Love you, asshole” and hung up — delivering emotional damage with the efficiency of billable hours.
I stood on the balcony for a long time after that, gripping the railing, looking down at the garden. Our bench. The jasmine. The spot where she’d tipped her head back while I held her feet and neither of us said what it meant. Declan was right. I was scared — of what I became near her, of the voice that roughened and the discipline that failed in ways I couldn’t reverse. Not scared she could see it. Scared that wanting her was a force that changed the whole design.
Mason cornered me in the kitchen at noon, because Mason had the subtlety of a golden retriever who’d learned to open doors.
“Hey.” He slid into the chair across from me with a protein bar and a smoothie the color of radioactive waste. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you.”
“No, seriously. You haven’t slept, you’ve been staring at your hands for ten minutes like they personally betrayed you, and you just stirred your coffee with the wrong end of a fork.” He sipped his neon smoothie. “She’s different, huh?”
I didn’t answer. Mason studied me with an expression sharper than his sunshine-and-chaos persona typically allowed, and I was reminded that the man everyone dismissed as comic relief saw more than he let on. You could hide a lot behind a smile that bright. I would know — I’d been hiding behind a scowl for thirty years, and the principle was identical.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” he said, his voice losing its bounce for a quieter register. “But how you looked at her yesterday, during the pie? I’ve never seen anyone look at another person like that. And I’ve been on three dating shows.”
