Not the careful not-looking-away quality he uses on everything — not reading, not assessing. Something has stoppedin him. His jaw is loose. His eyes are wide and then narrow, like he's trying to focus through something loud. His lips move again.Bilbo.Like he's testing it. Like the word came from somewhere he can't locate and he's following the thread back to the source.
Six strides across the yard and his hands are on my jacket and he's looking at my face with an intensity that would be alarming if I could feel alarmed right now, which I can't, because every cognitive function I have is occupied with the single impossible fact that is reorganizing everything.
"Billy," he says.
The mask comes down.
Nine years of it. Nine years of William Dalton security consultant, of cover stories that were also true, of becoming someone who could get close to Frosthaven Academy. Nine years of the professional distance assembled every morning like a uniform, and it comes down in one second because my little brother just said my name. My actual name. The one that David gave me when he was two and couldn't say William and that became the private name, the family name, the name that meantyou're safe, I'm here.
My hands find his face.
The tears are running before I decide to let them. I notice this distantly — the loss of control, the departure from every managed version of this moment I've been running in my head for years — and I don't try to stop it because there's nothing left to manage. He's here. He's real. His jaw is under my palms and he's looking at me the way he used to look at me when he was small and something was difficult and I was the person who was going to help.
"David," I say. And then: "Jim."
Both names. Both true.
Stone moves us inside. David beside me on the couch. My brother. Alive.
I catalogue the room by habit — Stone near the door with Lumi at his side, Jake against the wall with his jaw tight, Leo beside Alex — and stop. Alex.
She's across the room with Leo's shoulder against hers and her face is doing something she isn't showing anyone except that I've spent weeks learning her face and I know what it does when she's holding something back. Her eyes are soft and wet at the edges and there's something in them that has nothing to do with David specifically. Something older. Something that was already there.
I file it. There's no room for it yet.
I talk first because David is still finding his way back and I have nine years of information he doesn't.
His life. Eighteen when he disappeared. A student at Frosthaven — David had always been curious, always pushing at edges, the kind of person who trusted his own instincts further than was always wise. He went in and didn't come back. No body. No trace. The official line was runaway. I spent the next nine years running down every lead.
I say it flat. The emotion in the facts, not in how I deliver them. David listens with his whole body.
"I don't remember before," David says. "The feral — it takes the before. Names. Places." A pause. "I didn't know I had a brother."
I knew this was possible. I'd prepared for it. And it still hits me like something physical — my brother, looking at me across a foot of couch, not knowing he had a brother.
"You have a brother," I say.
I give it back one piece at a time.
Burnaby. The house on the cul-de-sac with the broken gate we kept meaning to fix. Mom and dad. A dog named Hopper — aretriever mix, ridiculous, endlessly affectionate, gone three years ago at fourteen. I watch his face as I sayHopperand something moves through it — a flicker, there and gone, the trace of something reaching for the surface.
Then I tell him about the snot.
I was eight. David was four. The whole family at the dinner table and I laughed at something — I can't even remember what — and snot came out of my nose in front of everyone. My mother laughed. My father laughed. David laughed the hardest of all, pointing, absolutely delighted. And after that, every time I laughed too hard, my thumb went to my nose without thinking. Family reflex. Family lore.
David called me Billy because he couldn't say William when he was two. Billy became Bilbo the summer he was eight and read the book and decided it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. He'd spring it on me in front of other people —this is my brother Bilbo— watching my face, delighted every time. Ten years of it. The last time he said it he was eighteen and leaving for Frosthaven and he said it at the door the way he always said it, like a signature, like a small reliable joke between us.
I'd told him to call me when he got settled.
He never called.
I watch David's face as I tell him this. Something is moving through it — not the dark where things land and stay dark, but the other kind, the kind where something is finding its way back.
Some of it surfaces something — a flicker, the expression of a man who has touched something he thought was gone. Some of it lands in the dark and he sits with it and waits and doesn't pretend he has it when he doesn't. I don't rush it. I have nowhere to be.
"I dreamed about a dog," David says. "For years. I didn't know what it meant."
I close my eyes.
