Then she turns to me and I get the same treatment, just tighter. “Mi niño,” she murmurs, arms tight around me. “You’ve been working too much. I can feel it.”
“I’m fine,” I lie into her hair.
She pulls back and squints at me like she can see through it. “We’ll talk about that,” she says softly, patting my cheek. Then, louder,“Ashton, mira quién llegó.”
Dad steps into the doorway behind her, no tie, sleeves rolled, bare feet,which always makes him look almost approachable. His jaw tenses when his eyes catch on our proximity, then smooths out like he forces himself to breathe first.
“Boys.”
“Hey,” Caleb says, shoving his hands in his hoodie pockets. “The house looks the same.”
“It should,” Dad says. “You haven’t been gone long enough for us to renovate.”
It’s not really a joke, but it’s an attempt. The corner of his mouth twitches like he’s trying it on.
“Come in, come in,” Mom clucks, ushering us over the threshold. “I have dinner almost ready. Go put your things down in your rooms, wash your hands, and then sit. You look tired.”
“You look like you’ve been preparing to feed an army of hungry soldiers.” I say, catching the smell of roasting garlic, tomatoes, and something with cumin and onion.
“You boys eat like an army,” she says proudly.
Caleb hesitates for half a heartbeat, glancing back at me. I bump his shoulder with mine. “Same rooms as always,” I say quietly. “You get the good mattress, remember?”
His mouth quirks. “VIP suite.”
We drop our bags—mine back in my old room with the too-firm bed and the posters still half-taped on the walls, his in the slightly bigger room Mom insisted on giving him “so he feels safe.” It still has the broken-in mattress we picked out together when he moved in full-time.
I catch his eye in the hallway as we head back out. He’s flushed high on his cheeks, which tells me he’s remembering the same thing.
“Stop,” I murmur under my breath. “Later.”
“Not my fault,” he mutters back. “The house is haunted by bad decisions.”
“Ourbad decisions,” I correct. “Equal opportunity haunting.”
Dinner is shredded beef,arroz, beans, fresh tortillas, and a salad Mom pretends is the main event. We sit at the table we’ve sat at a thousand times—Mom at one end, Dad at the other, and Caleb and me on the long side, close enough that our knees can bump if we want them to.
Caleb wants them to.
His jeans brush mine, light and tentative, and I press back.
Mom talks first, like she always does, filling the air so no one else has to. She talks about how the bakery she likes reopened under new management. How the lady from church keepsnagging her to join a committee. How she told her, “I don’t have time to argue with Father about women in the altar society. I’m too busy.”
Caleb chokes on his water, laughing. “You really said that to her?”
“I said it nicely,” she says, offended. “With a smile. Like this.” She shows us the smile and we all know that smile.
Dad listens, quiet, sipping his beer. His eyes flick to us often, like he’s checking how long we can coast before we hit something sharp.
It doesn’t take long.
“So,” he says at one point, after Mom launches into a story about a neighbor. “How are classes going, Caleb? Midterms?”
Caleb straightens a little, instinctively. “Good,” he says. “Busy. Stats is trying to kill me, but Dr. Kaur says my coping strategies are… better.” He glances at me.
Dad’s jaw tightens, but not in the way I used to dread. More like the word “therapist” still nicks him somewhere tender. “I’m glad you’re… using your resources,” he says carefully. “Do you… feel like you’re keeping things balanced? Basketball, therapy, this—” a vague gesture between the two of us “—all at once?”
Caleb’s knee presses into mine under the table and I flip my palm up, leaving my hand on my own thigh, open, where he can reach it if he wants.
