I crouched down and looked at the spread of it properly. It was for a sociology course — he had the right material, organised well enough conceptually, but the physical execution was fighting him. “What's the exam format?”
“Short answer and one long essay.”
“Then you don't need five categories. You need two. Things you know well enough to apply and things you're still shaky on. Everything else is noise.”
Micah looked at the cards. Then at me. “That's so much simpler than what I've been doing.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn't I think of that.”
“You were too inside it.” I straightened up. “Sort them tonight, run through the shaky pile twice before you sleep, check the good pile once in the morning. You'll be fine.”
Micah started pulling cards into two piles. “Are you always this direct?”
“I'm told it's a problem.”
“I like it.” He was sorting fast, occasionally holding a card up and making a face that put it in the shaky pile. “Soren should've brought you around earlier.”
“I'm right here,” Soren said.
“I know. I'm telling Rook.” Micah looked up briefly. “He said you played hockey with him in high school.”
“He was the best player on the team,” I said.
Micah glanced at his brother. “You always said you were decent.”
“I was being modest.”
“You were being Soren,” I said. “Which is the same thing, but in the other direction.”
Soren looked at me over his mug with an expression that was trying to be unimpressed and not getting there. “You want more coffee or are you just here to undermine me in my own home?”
“Both,” I said. “Multitasking.”
Micah's grin spread across his face, the first fully unguarded expression I'd seen from him all evening, and in it I could see the nine-year-old he'd been — the kid hiding under the table, watching everything carefully from the safest vantage point available.
“I like him,” he said, to no one specifically. “He can stay.”
We endedup in the living room.
Poppy had migrated out from her bedroom with her laptop once the thesis statement had been sorted, operating on the logic that the common space was now open for business. She installed herself in the corner of the couch and settled in. Micah came through to make tea, went back, came through again, eventuallygave up and just sat on the floor with his flashcards and a second donut.
Soren sat at the other end of the couch from Poppy with his sock feet on the coffee table and his coffee going cold on the side table because he kept forgetting it was there. He'd let his guard down over the last hour in the way I recognised — the careful watchfulness from the door gone, replaced by something looser. He wasn't making anything look easier than it was. He just was.
I sat in the armchair across from them and watched the three of them exist in each other's orbit and tried to identify what I was feeling, which turned out to be something I didn't have a clean word for.
Micah asked Poppy something about her paper and she answered without looking up, and he argued mildly with her answer and she told him he was wrong with easy, years-deep affection, the kind that had its own shorthand. Soren interjected once with a third opinion that they both dismissed simultaneously, which made him grin at his own mug.
They'd built a whole language between them.
I thought about what Soren had said in the kitchen. The scholarship. The music program. The timing that didn't care what you wanted.
He'd been eighteen when everything detonated. Scholarship in hand and three younger siblings and parents who had made themselves unavailable in every way that counted. And he'd looked at what was in front of him and he had chosen this. Not because someone forced him. Because he had decided they mattered more than the version of his life that might have been.
Poppy said something funny from the couch and Micah threw a flashcard at her and she caught it without looking up, and Soren laughed.
I looked at the three of them.
