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“What?” Rowan asked with a frown. Aiden glanced at her before looking away. “What do you mean when you realized it?”

He didn’t want to talk about this. Rehashing things from the past never seemed to go well and this was the first time he’d seen Rowan in years. Aiden didn’t want to spend that time arguing about things that couldn’t be undone. It was pointless and would only leave him frustrated in the end.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally, trying to force a smile to his face. “I haven’t seen you in—”

“Don’t do that,” Rowan cut in, halting the flow of his words. “Don’t just brush off what you were going to say.”

The brittle smile broke slowly on his face, but he tried again to salvage it. “I’m not brushing things off. There’s just no point in talking about things that won’t change.”

“How do you know they won’t change if you don’t talk about it?” Rowan insisted. “You and Dad always do this. You rush over things, as if that’ll keep people from wanting to talk about it.”

“I’m not, Rowan.”

“You are. Just ask the questions you want to ask and say the things you want to say so we can talk about them.” Her voice grew louder, each syllable breaking down the wall holding back Aiden’s emotions. Everything was swelling even as he desperately tried to keep the waves of frustration at bay. “Deflecting doesn’t do anyone any good.”

He exhaled hard, his fists balled at his sides. “I’m not deflecting. I just don’t understand why you came all this way if you were just going to talk shit about Dad and tell me I’m some horrible person.”

“That’s not why I came,” she said. “And you’re not a horrible person. You know that.”

“Do I?” he asked. “You came from wherever you were because Vini talked behind my back about a situation I was already handling. You didn’t come to make up with me. You came to make a point.”

“I came to make sure you were okay.”

Aiden held his arms out. “Well, you’ve checked and clearly I’m alive and well, so yay me.”

“Don’t do that,” she said sharply, her voice nearly making him wince. “Don’t joke about this. The fire was serious. If you had been home, you could have been hurt. And when Vini told me about Dad . . . I’m your sister. I know you’re probably angry with me for leaving—”

“Of course I’m angry,” he cut in. “But bringing this shit up won’t magically undo the last ten years or Dad’s choice. Or yours.” The words slipped out and yet Aiden couldn’t find it in him to reel them back in.

Rowan’s expression darkened and her lips pressed into a thin line before she spoke up again. “I don’t know what you mean about my choices, but keeping things buried is why our family is fractured now.”

Aiden couldn’t help but huff out a humorless laugh. “We’re not fractured. This is just how we are.” But even as he said it, he thought about the Williams family and how they acted around one another. He couldn’t deny that he longed for a familial relationship that had the same warmth. It was just that he couldn’t imagine it in his own. There was so much history that had never been acknowledged, but even the thought of trying was so intimidating that it made his heart race and his stomach clench up.

Rowan didn’t say anything at first. She just stared like she could hear his inner thoughts. When she finally did speak, he wished he’d never said anything at all.

“I know things were hard for you,” she began. “When Mom died . . . things were just different. Everyone was grieving, especially Dad, but that didn’t give him the right to use that grief against us.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did,” she burst out, almost looking like she wanted to stomp her feet against the floor. “Dad used grief as a chain around our ankles to keep us in line.”

Aiden’s heart thumped painfully, but he shook the feeling off. “He did the best he could after she died.” His words came out sounding more like a rehearsed fact rather than something he truly believed. “You don’t get to come back years later and act like you know better. You weren’t there.”

Rowan’s jaw clenched as she bit out her words. “Don’t throw that at me like I made the decision on a whim or left for fun.”

“But you did leave.” Aiden’s voice rang out in the room, his anger and frustration threaded in every syllable. “You left Dad and you left me.”

“I left because of him,” she said, voice cracking. “That was the only reason. He drove me away and even when I tried to come back months later, he told me to stay gone.”

Aiden’s mouth clicked shut. Her words echoed in his mind as he tried to make sense of them. He’d always thought Rowan left and never looked back. At least . . . that was what he’d always been told.

“I left because every day in that house, every time I had to talk with him, I felt like I was drowning.” Her words tumbled out, gaining momentum like a stone rolling downhill. “I left because grief turned him into a small, mean person who used emotions like a weapon and treated us like pawns. I left because I knew if I didn’t, I would break apart slowly, until there was nothing left of me. But I tried to come back for you.”

He swallowed hard at the cracks in her voice and the heaviness of her words. All of this was new to him. All of this was stabbing at everything he had ever known.

“And now, you’re standing here acting just like him and it makes me feel like I’ve failed you as a sister.”

The words hit him like a punch, and he nearly fell back. “I’m nothing like him,” he gritted out, the denial sitting bitter on his tongue. But even as he said those words, he wondered if they were true. His heart pounded staccato beats against his ribs and he could almost hear the blood rushing through his veins.