“You know you can.”
“Did you ever tell Noah about your parents? Like, properly?”
He looks up. “Where did that come from?”
I gesture at the laundry piles. “My brain wanders in laundromats. I was thinking about when we were kids. You were always at our place, but you never talked about them.”
“Honestly, I don’t remember much about them.” He folds a T-shirt and sets it down. “What brought that up?”
“You said something yesterday about your grandmother. About how it was mostly just the two of you for a long time.” I watch him. “I was wondering how much Noah knew.”
“Noah knows the shape of it,” he says. “He knows they died in a car accident. I didn’t go into detail because there’s so muchI don’t remember. But it’s not his thing to push on, not mine to put on him.”
“No,” I say. “He wouldn’t push.”
“Your brother has a specific skill set. He doesn’t ask questions. He just appears when you need another person in the room.”
I smile at that. “That’s him exactly.”
Griffin picks up another item.
“How old were you?” I ask. “When you went to your grandmother’s.”
“Six.”
“Was it—” I pause. “Sorry. You don’t have to—”
“It was good,” he says anyway. “She was strict. She didn’t do sentiment, and her house had rules, but that’s exactly what I needed. I wanted walls.”
He holds up what he’s folding to examine the seam, and it is absolutely a pair of my underwear. I watch him put it on the pile with the same composure he applies to buying the gas station snacks.
“Tell me something,” he says. “You’re interrogating me, so I get one.”
Fair. “Go ahead.”
He leans back in the plastic chair, legs stretched out. “Childhood fear. Something stupid.”
I look at him. “What do you mean?”
“Not spiders or the dark. Something specific. Something embarrassing.”
I think about it for three seconds. “Escalators.”
He arches a brow at me.
“The bit where you have to get on,” I continue. “The timing. I always thought I was going to miss the step or get my foot caught and get swallowed by the machine.”
“How long did this last?”
I shrug. “Honestly? I still think about it.”
He’s trying but failing not to smile. “Escalators, Piper? Really?”
“What’s yours?” I say, pointing a finger.
“This doesn’t leave the laundromat.”
“Obviously.”
