“I need you.”
Twenty minutes later, my brother is in the kitchen, shrugging off his coat as I pace the floor.
“I can’t do this right now,” I stammer, my hands shaking. “I’ve got work. She’s not well. Dad’s gone. Piper’s MIA. Rowan’s…”
“Madison.” Noah steps into my space, his largehands pressing firmly against my shoulders. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
I hate how instinctive it is, how easily my body obeys him.
In.
Out.
He’s only two years older than me, but he’s always been the anchor. He’s the steady one. He was the closest thing we had to a parent when our parents couldn’t be. It’s no wonder he became a therapist.
“I have the morning free,” he says. “I’ll stay.”
Relief hits me so hard that I have to lean into him.
I fill him in quickly. Meds. Toast. The vacant look in her eyes. He nods, filing it all away with clinical precision.
“Open a window upstairs,” I add, pointing at him. “She needs air. It’s stagnant up there.”
He raises an eyebrow, his gaze dropping to my careful posture. “Aren’t you supposed to be resting? I heard about hot yoga.”
I roll my eyes. “No rest for the wicked.”
“You need to slow down, Madi. Seriously.”
I arch an eyebrow, mirroring his look. “And we both know what happens when we slow down, don’t we? We start thinking.”
He sighs. “You’re not Mom.”
“You chose psychology to make sure we never would be,” I fire back.
That earns me a sad, knowing smile. He pulls me into a hug, and for a second, I let myself be the sister instead of the fixer. We’ve danced this dance since we were teenagers. Before there was a clinical name for what Mom was going through, we were the cleanup crew.
I spent my life trying to fix the woman upstairs.
Noah studied psychology because he wants nothing more than to understand her.
“He does this,” I whisper into his shoulder. “When things get hard, Dad disappears. He always has.”
“Yeah,” Noah exhales.
“It’s not like he doesn’t care,” I add quickly, my internal defense mechanism kicking in. “I know he does. He just… he can’t sit in the quiet. He doesn’t know what to say to her when she won’t talk back.”
“He never could,” Noah says. “But someone had to be the adult.”
We both know who that someone was. It was the two of us, huddled in the hallway, deciding who would make dinner and who would check the medicine cabinet.
“I called the girls,” I say, pulling away. “Piper didn’t answer. Rowan went to voicemail. And honestly…”
“Honestly what?”
“I don’t like involving them,” I admit, staring at a chip in the kitchen counter. “I never have.”
“Why?”
