Page 59 of All the way home

Oscar stuck an elbow into Siobhan’s side, one dark eyebrow raised magnificently. “Shut up. It is so not a big deal.”

“It is a code orange,” Siobhan insisted.

“Blasphemer.” Oscar gasped in mock outrage. “You know the codes are sacred. It’s a code yellow, at best.”

“It’s a code nothing. Why does it matter?” As Rena pivoted between the two of them, helplessness rose.

“Well, do you love him?” Siobhan asked.

“How am I supposed to tell?” When Oscar opened his mouth to respond, Rena held her hand up so it blocked his face. “If this has anything to do with Kieran, I do not want to hear about it. It will go in the vault of cursed things I won’t be able to forget.”

“I was never in love with Kieran,” Oscar said, so Rena lowered her hand. “I was in lust with him.”

Her hand snapped right back up. “Ew! No!”

“I can’t help that your brother is like that.” Oscar shrugged.

“You can help where you stick your tongue, though,” Rena told him with a little shudder.

“Here’s how you tell if you love him.” Siobhan to the rescue. “You just have to think about how you would feel if he died.”

“Siobhan!” Rena and Oscar objected in unison.

That afternoon, Rena had brought it up to Lucas. It was only later that evening that Kieran explained to her why that was “impressively stupid,” but at the time, it had felt logical.

“What do you think it means to love someone?” she asked as they were on their way to her room to study.

Lucas stopped midstep, and she ran straight into his back.

“Oof.”

“What?” He’d sounded so alarmed that she’d immediately backtracked.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

But he asked her again once they were settled with their textbooks on her bedroom floor. And he kept his eyes averted, which she was coming to learn meant he was a bit nervous. “Where did that come from?”

She tapped her pen against her lips while she tried to figure out how to respond in a chill, cool way. “Oh, I don’t know. I was curious.”

Smiling, hair falling into his eyes, Lucas started cautiously, “You were curious what I think love means.”

Uncapping her highlighter with her teeth, her response came out muffled. “I guess so.”

“I mean, that’s a question people have been trying to answer basically forever, right?”

“I was wondering what you think it means.”

“In general or to me?”

Squinting up at him, Rena tried to figure out if he was being tricky on purpose. Sometimes Kieran asked her questions that honed down to specifics just to—in their dad’s words, “be a little shit”—but Lucas seemed serious. “To you.”

“I don’t know if I’ve really thought about it much,” he said. “What do you think it means?”

She was ready and didn’t hesitate. “Siobhan says that it’s about being sad if the person you love died.”

With a good-natured eye-roll, he laughed. “Oh, well, if Siobhan says—”

Leaning across her textbook, Rena cut him off with a kiss.