Page 70 of All the way home

Will his family still watch them without him? They only started because of him.

“We’ve been watching for, like, ten years. Tove thought it’d be cool to show me, and then I was insane about it, and it just became a family thing, since almost everyone is around in late December anyway.” Zach sucks in a breath. “Usually.”

If he were fractionally less despondent, he might be able to explain how important this is. The Ursids are . . .

The Ursids are proof that his family is the best in the universe. That not a single one of them could give less of a shit about meteors, but that they’ll stay up because Zach does. They’ll make it happen, every year, just because Zach loves it.

“Whatever. It’s the weather. I can’t control it.”

Even to himself, Zach sounds hollow.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Rena

It’s the eyes too.

It’s the eyes that make him look so much like Josiah, Rena decides at last. Strikingly blue. Josiah’s had been blue, too, but brighter.

He and Kieran are sitting so closely.

Gently, Lucas nudges her elbow. He’s holding his phone screen angled toward her, Notes app open. On an otherwise blank note, he’s written: You are wearing your face of fury.

Pressing her lips together, Rena eyes him. Then she purposely relaxes the muscles around her mouth.

Kieran’s still watching Zach, though. Not intently, or with any particular agenda that she can see, just . . . observing. When Zach smirks at something on his phone, Kieran’s whole expression shifts—it’s the face he makes when he’s pleased but he doesn’t want anyone to know.

When he catches Kieran watching, surprise, amusement, and self-consciousness ripple across Zach’s face one after the other.

Beside her, Lucas is trying to catch her eye again. This time the note says: You’re a human person not a security camera.

She scowls at him.

As he pockets his phone, the slope of Lucas’s nose wrinkles, and his lips twitch into a smile.

“What?” Rena asks, leaning closer.

“Thinking about how I could naturally bring up jazz in conversation,” he mutters, and snorts when she elbows him.

“Don’t you dare.”

“What are the chances Kieran didn’t mention we asked about him?”

“Zero,” Rena whispers. “And don’t bring up jazz.”

She and Lucas fall silent, and she catches the tone as Kieran asks Zach something, laced with genuine concern, that quiet, conciliatory edge he almost never uses with anyone but her.

Rena’s chest twangs, a sharp, brilliant ache.

“Thanks.” Zach straightens and clears this throat, rolling out his shoulders. “It’ll be fine.”

Kieran looks unconvinced.

“Sorry about that.” When Zach opens his mouth, Rena has the strong impression that he thinks he’s been placed in front of a firing squad. “Just telling my family about the delay.”

He sounds oddly formal. Rena wonders if he’s nervous. He’s looked nervous every second she’s seen him so far tonight. She can’t help wondering what Kieran told him about her, if anything. A sudden flare of paranoia rushes to strangle her—did Kieran say anything she doesn’t already know? Does this stranger know more about what happened than she does?

“So,” Zach says, when nobody else responds. “You all came out here together for school?”