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I set the fork down. “You don’t get to⁠—”

“Fawn,” Ryker calls from the doorway. I didn’t hear him approach. He’s dressed in dark slacks and a sweater, his hair still wet from the shower. He looks at the plate, at me, at the way I’m standing with my shoulders braced against the counter like I’m waiting for impact.

“Relax. You are fine. Bailey is fine,” he assures me. “Don’t worry about anything. I’m pretty sure your sister thinks this is a vacation.”

“She thinks what I tell her to think,” I say, and the old bitterness is there, the exhaustion of managing another person’s reality. “That’s our relationship. I handle the truth so she doesn’t have to.”

Ryker crosses the kitchen, stopping at a distance that feels deliberate. Not close enough to crowd me. Not far enough to let me forget he’s there.

“That stops,” he says.

“What?”

“The handling. The managing. The carrying everything so she can float.” His voice is flat, factual, the same tone he used on the phone with his father. “You’re here now. That means you don’t have to hold the whole world together by yourself. It also means she doesn’t get to pretend you’re not falling apart.”

I stare at him. “You don’t know anything about our relationship.”

“I know you’re twenty-one, and you’ve been parenting her since you were old enough to reach the stove.” He doesn’t flinch from my expression. “I know you haven’t slept through the night in years. I know you paid her tuition last semester with money you made working eighteen-hour shifts and eating whatever the cook couldn’t sell.” A pause. “I know because I paid the rest, and I watched you not eat for three days to make up the difference.”

The kitchen goes quiet. Kipton has stopped pretending to cook. Noah is very still beside me, his mug frozen halfway to his mouth.

“You what?” My voice comes out wrong. Too high. Too thin.

“I’ve been watching you for six months,” Ryker says. “All three of us have. We know your shifts, your routes, the way you check your rearview mirror three times before you turn onto your street. We know you carry a knife in your boot that you’ve never used and hope you never have to. We know—” He stops. Swallows. Something cracks in his careful control, just for a moment, just enough to show me the man underneath. “We know you deserve better than this. Better than us. But we’re what you have, and we’re not going anywhere.”

I should scream. I should throw the coffee mug at his head, walk out the door, and keep walking until this house and these men and this impossible, suffocating honesty are miles behind me.

Instead, I stand there with cold toast in front of me and feel something I don’t have a name for. It’s not safety, because safety is a lie people tell themselves so they can sleep. Not anger, either, though that’s there too, burning low in my gut like a pilot light.

It’s wanting.

A wanting that rises in me like a tide, the wanting to believe that someone sees me, really sees me, the wanting to put down the weight I’ve carried so long I’ve forgotten what my shoulders feel like without it.

“I don’t know how to do this,” I say, and the words surprise me. I didn’t mean to say them. I didn’t mean to be honest.

Ryker nods, slow and careful. “Neither do we.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s just true.”

The back door opens again and Malcom steps in, carrying a duffel bag that isn’t mine. Behind him, Bailey’s voice rises, bright and careless and completely out of place in this kitchen full of dangerous men and broken confessions.

“Fawn? Fawn, you have to see this place! It’s like a freaking resort. There’s a pool house and everything…”

She rounds the corner and stops, taking in the scene. Me at the counter, pale and sleepless and surrounded. Three brothers positioned around the room like they’re guarding something or someone. The air is thick with things we haven’t said.

Bailey’s smile falters for half a second. Then it brightens, the way it always does, her defense mechanism against a world that asks too much of her.

“Well,” she says, dropping her bag and crossing to me. “Looks like I missed all the fun.”

She hugs me. And I let her, standing stiff in her embrace, smelling her shampoo and her optimism and the life we had before Halloween cracked everything open. She doesn’t notice my tension. She never does. Or she notices and chooses not to see it, which might be worse.

“Come on,” she says, pulling back, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes bright and empty of anything complicated. “Show me your room. I bet it’s huge. I bet there’s a bathroom with one of those rainfall showerheads.”

“Bailey…”

“Fawn.” Ryker’s voice again, quiet but carrying. “Go with your sister. We’ll be here when you’re done.”