At night, in the cabin — which smelled like pine and fireplace smoke and something that felt dangerously close to Christmas — we’d sit in front of the fire while my parents read or talked quietly behind us.
And I’d watch Cassian go drowsy and still.
The tight thing he always carried in his shoulders just… gone.
His eyes half-closed. The fire catching the gold in his hair.
Content in a way he never quite looked at home.
I wanted to keep us there forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
TEN YEARS OLD
• • •
He kept me guessing constantly.
That was the thing about Cassian that got under my skin so early. Just when I thought I understood him, he’d shift. Say something unexpected. Do something that didn’t fit.
Intense one minute, ridiculous the next.
The kind of person you couldn’t look away from because you never knew what you were going to get.
I loved that about him.
I wish I’d been more careful about how much.
Because I didn’t see it then — the distance he kept. How deliberate it was. How vast. I was just happy.
Life felt complete in the way it only does when you’re ten and don’t know yet that things can be taken from you.
Best friend. Amazing parents. School was easy. Home was warm.
I had everything I needed.
I just didn’t know to hold onto it.
It was around this time I started hearing things.
Not directly — nobody tells you anything directly at ten. But between my parents and his, in the gaps adults leave when they think you’re not listening, something was off.
Cassian was getting in trouble at school.
At risk of being left behind.
The word I kept hearing was distant.
I sat with that for a long time.
Turned it over and over and couldn’t make it fit the person I knew. I had a million words for Cassian.
Could fill a thousand pages with who I thought he was. Not one of them would be distant.
If anything, his mom had gone distant, calling less and less.
My mom mentioned it once to my dad, low-voiced, when she thought I was asleep. Something in her tone that I’d never heard from her before. Careful. Like she was trying not to make it bigger than it was, and wasn’t sure she was succeeding.
