He’s braced, like he’s waiting for me to say something sharp, and part of me still wants to. Three days ago I put him in the same sentence as Mason, and I’m not ready to take it back. Hell, I’m not even sure I was wrong to be angry.
But the anger thins out the second I look at him, and I can’t get it back.
I give him the smallest smile. “Hi,” I say.
His shoulders drop. “Hey,” he says. “Got you coffee.”
He holds out a cup to me, and I can smell it before I take it. Oat milk latte with honey. We were in the same crowd at a coffee shop, and I ordered while he was talking to other people. Yet,somehow, he remembered my not-so-simple coffee order like it was nothing.
Something in me eases, just a little, and I step back and let him in. “Come in,” I say.
He sits across from his sister and puts his coffee down. I make myself busy, and Ivy fires up about how scared she is. And through it all, he doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t sayI’m sure she’s finein the way that meansplease stop being upset so I can feel comfortable again.
He waits until she’s done, absorbing the whole tsunami of emotion that is Ivy on any given day. “Dad called me before Mom got through to you. I came straight over,” he says.
“I… I just don’t know what to do, Ro.” Ivy sighs, blinking back tears and looking up to the ceiling. “I don’t know if we should go there, or not, or?—”
“We shouldn’t do anything yet,” Rowan says. “Dad is managing the situation. If you call now, he’ll have to also manage you.”
Ivy blinks. “That’s?—”
“It’s true.” He says it without heat, and slides closer to her, wrapping an arm around her. “I’ll call in an hour and see what they need, okay?”
I’ve given up all pretense of doing other things, and now I’m sitting on my bed, opposite them. I wrap both hands around the coffee and watch him work.
Ivy stares at him — the bright, grateful, slightly undone stare of someone being handled competently in a moment when they cannot handle themselves. And in that moment I get the feeling that this is how it’s always been for them.
“I’m ordering food,” he says. “You haven’t eaten.”
“How do you know?—”
“Educated guess?” One eyebrow goes up. “Based on a lifetime of history?”
“Fine,” Ivy says, very quietly. “Noodles.”
He types the order into the campus dining app with the look of someone spending the last of their reserves on staying calm, and I wonder what else he’s carrying right now. Because, every time I see him, he looks tired and weighed down.
Everyone leans on him.
But who does he lean on?
Mason would never have shown up before he was asked, taken Ivy’s whole flood of panic without flinching, or ordered noodles because she hadn’t eaten. And he’d never have let himself look this tired while everyone else came apart.
When Ivy drops her attention to her phone, his hand slides off his knee and presses flat against his own thigh, fingers spread wide like he’s bracing. I look away before he catches me seeing it.
“She’s going to be okay,” he says.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. But she’s stable, she’s conscious, she’s talking, and apparently she’s already complaining about the hospital food. That’s a lot of okay.”
Ivy exhales.
He puts her coffee in front of her, and she wraps both hands around it. They sit like that while he watches something on his phone and she stares at nothing, and the room is quiet in the way it gets when the crisis has downgraded fromemergencytowait.
“I’ve got to go,” he says to Ivy. “But I’ll check in with you later, okay?”
She nods and smiles at him.
