“Not once. And she never stopped trying. That’s the thing about Sof. She’ll fail at the same recipe forty times and still preheat the oven.”
I lean against the counter. The cold tile presses through my shirt.
“She steals my fries. Orders her own. Always. Then eats half of mine. And when I call her out, she gives me these big innocent eyes.” I widen mine in demonstration. “‘What fries?’ she says. While she’s chewing. While the evidence is in her mouth.”
A sound leaves me. Not quite a laugh. “I started ordering extra. Never told her why. She thinks she’s getting away with it.”
“She sounds like Marco.”
I blink. “What?”
“My brother. Takes food off your plate and acts offended when you notice.”
A laugh punches out of me. Unexpected. Real. “Must be a youngest sibling thing.”
“Must be.”
The silence settles. Not the heavy kind. The kind that makes space for the next words.
“Her laugh is too loud. Always has been. She never learned to control it, never figured out how to take up less space. She just exists at full volume.”
My face is wet. No idea when that started. Not sobbing. Not breaking down. Overflow. Like the words carry more than a voice can hold and the excess has to find another way out.
“She crawled into my bed until she was fourteen. Nightmares.” I press the rim against my forehead. The cold anchors me. “She’d show up at my door and I’d scoot over without a word. I never asked what the dreams were about.”
“Did they stop?”
“I left for college before I found out.”
That hangs between us.
“She wanted to be a marine biologist. Octopuses.” I drag my wrist across my cheek. “Told me everything about them. Three hearts. Color-changing skin. They can unscrew jar lids from the inside.”
A wet laugh that I don’t try to stop. “She was fifteen and she knew more about cephalopods than most grad students and she burned brownies every single time and she was loud and she stole my fries and she was fifteen.”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen.”
The kitchen absorbs that.
“You didn’t break anything.” His voice is closer. When I look up, he’s crossed the kitchen. Standing in front of me, near enough that the moonlight catches the hard lines of his jaw and the tension locked in his shoulders. “You didn’t cause this. They did.”
“I left her in that house.”
“You were eighteen. You left a bad situation. That’s surviving.”
“She wasn’t surviving.”
“Because of the people who took her. Not because of you.” His jaw is set. There’s heat behind his eyes that isn’t anger. Isn’t pity. There’s no category for the way he’s looking at me, and I’m a person who categorizes everything. “You’ve been fighting for her every day since. Every single day. Alone.” His voice is dropping, getting rougher, like the words cost him and he’s paying anyway. “You built an entire ghost to hunt ghosts. You’re not the reason she’s gone, Isabella. You’re the reason she’s coming home.”
My chest loosens. I breathe.
I press my palms flat on the counter. The tile bites through the cotton. My face is a disaster and I don’t care, because I juststood in a dark kitchen and bled in front of a man who doesn’t bleed in front of anyone.
“I’m not usually like this.” I gesture at my face. At the tears. The wreckage. “This isn’t my thing. I have a reputation. Ghost. Very intimidating digital specter.”
“Terrifying.”
