And that unsettled me more than anything waiting in the streets below.
* * *
I checked on Fiona and Lily before heading back down.
Their door sat cracked open, soft light spilling into the hallway. I paused outside, leaning against the wall and listened.
Fiona, mid-story—a smile threaded so thoroughly through her voice I could hear it without seeing her face.
“—and Brenna swore she could walk it off,” she said. “Full-on limping, ankle the size of a grapefruit, absolutely convinced she just needed to power through.”
Lily laughed. “That sounds like something I’d do.”
“That sounds exactly like something you’d do,” Fiona shot back without missing a beat.
I leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, and let myself stay there a moment longer than necessary. The sound of it—laughter, easy and unhurried, completely disconnected from everything waiting outside these walls—made me reluctant to move.
“She took one step,” Fiona continued, “and just—collapsed. Completely. And Finn—” she caught sight of me in the doorway and nodded in my direction, “—ten years old, immediately goes into full panic mode.”
I pushed the door open and stepped inside. “I did not panic.”
Fiona smirked. “You absolutely panicked.”
“I assessed the situation.”
“You yelled.”
Lily looked between us, grinning wide, and the expression on her face—so openly entertained, so young—settled somewhere protective.
“What happened next?”
Fiona settled back against the wall, eyes drifting the way they always did when she landed on a memory worth keeping. “I mean, I wouldn’t know firsthand—I’d just turned four. Barely remember the trip at all. But Callan and Brenna told that story so many times growing up it might as well be my own.” She shook her head, still smiling. “Every holiday. Every family dinner. Brenna would start it, Callan would interrupt with corrections, and Finn would sit there pretending he wasn’t listening, and by the end the two of them would be arguing about details as if it happened the week before.”
“Callan had just gotten home from deployment,” she went on, quieter now. “It was the first trip we’d all taken together in a long time. Brenna slipped on loose rock, twisted her ankle—turned out it’d broken—and we’re miles from the trail head. Middle of nowhere, no signal, no way out except on foot.”
The memory surfaced sharper than I expected. “She tried to stand up again.”
“She’s stubborn,” Fiona said.
“She’s an idiot,” I said.
Lily laughed softly.
“So what did you do?”
Fiona glanced at me, her smile going softer at the edges before she answered.
“Finn and Callan carried her. The whole way back.”
I shrugged. “Callan did most of the work.”
“Not true,” Fiona said immediately. “Brenna always made a point of saying that when she told it. Said you refused to switch out, even when your arms shook so hard you could barely keep your grip.”
I exhaled quietly. “I managed fine.”
“You were ten,” she said, her voice dropping just enough to change the weight of it. “And you wouldn’t put her down. Not once. Not the whole way.”
Lily studied me from across the space—quiet, careful, working something out behind her eyes, like she tried to line up this ten-year-old who wouldn’t quit with the man standing in front of her now.
