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“I think my son saw you. You were with someone he knew, perhaps?”

I was. If Aras knows my silent business partner. But I’m not about to give anyone up for breaking and entering private property. So I shrug and Oscar grins, though it seems heavy with something that has nothing to do with me.

My hands are full of greenery. I incline my head to the house. “Come inside.”

Inside is a stretch. The back wall of the structure is mainly rubble, just a tarp between us and the elements. But I already know Oscar sees the promise in things before he even thinks of the bad and he doesn’t seem to mind that my kitchen catches the wind blowing in from the nearby cliffs.

He’s more interested in my fancy new boiler. “I have one of these.”

“Really?” He doesn’t seem the type any more than I am to spend money on premium appliances.

“I rent my house from River O’Brian. He lived there when the old boiler failed and nearly killed him. The Kings replaced it with…this.” He waves his hand at the boiler. “I am still not sure I know how it works. And I have more carbon monoxide detectors than I know what to do with.”

I point at the opposite cabinet. Then at the ceiling, and the battered dresser. Three detectors and that’s just in here. “I wondered why Cam rolled up with a box of them.”

“This type flashes, yes? Instead of screaming at you?”

“Yeah. There’s a vibration device I’m supposed to sleep with, but it’s not the good kind, and I don’t have a bed, so…”

“What is the good kind of vibration?”

I beckon Oscar closer and lay my hand on his chest. “Say my name.”

Oscar obliges and his deep voice buzzes in my arm. I let it happen without explanation, let it wash over me, and of course he doesn’t need me to explain it. He chuckles and wraps his warm hand around my wrist, grounding me there. “I like that I can do this for you.”

“You’re the only person who can.”

A beat passes where we could maybe kiss. But we don’t. Oscar smiles at me and I smile at him. Then it passes and he shifts away.

I let that happen too.

Focus on lighting the gas stove in the corner of my ramshackle kitchen.

“The chimney is sound?”

Oscar asks this from my peripheral. It takes me a second to compute what he means.

“Not sure.” I open the small fridge I brought from Moondust Farm. “One of Folk’s friends made me promise not to find out until he’d inspected it properly. It’s like they think I’ve never lived in a house before.”

Oscar waits for me to finish in the fridge and face him again before he answers. “Was the friend Locke Halliwell?”

“Of course it was.”

“He was a firefighter,” Oscar reminds me. “If not for him, River would’ve died in our house.”

“You were there?”

“No. Aras and I were away. But it could easily have been us. It is why we are lucky to have friends like these, no?”

He’s right. I know he is. “I like Locke,” I concede. “He helped Folk when he was detoxing way back when.”

Zero surprise lights Oscar’s warm eyes and I realise, not for the first time, that my brother has been more open in the past few years than he was the entire lifetime I knew him before. Because he’s been present, when he was pretty much gone from my existence more than a decade.

Oscar comes to my side and he’s so warm it’s like rolling closer to the heat of a campfire. “Families are complicated.”

“Are they?”

He hums and I feel it. No, it’s more than that, and I find myself tilting my head, as if something’s come loose.