HARPER: I should be back by lunch. I’ll be the one trying not to stare at you like you hung the moon.
I can’t help it—I smile. A real smile, the kind that makes my face feel weird because I use it so rarely at school. The golden boy doesn’t smile like an idiot at his phone. The golden boy maintains composure.
But Harper sees past the golden boy. Sees past the student council treasurer and the debate team captain and the Harvard-bound prototype everyone else wants me to be.
She seesme. The guy who schedules when it’s safe to cry—usually just at night, in the dark, when she comesthrough the bathroom into my room and curls against my chest. The guy who checks and rechecks silverware alignment at dinner because if he can keep the small things in order, maybe the big things won’t fall apart.
The guy who’s terrified every single day that he’s not enough.
And somehow, impossibly, she loves that guy.
Or she’s learning to. I think. The heart emojis have to mean something.
CALEB: Love you too.
I send it before I can second-guess myself. Even though she won’t say it back. Even though I know I’m pushing, know I should give her space to come to it on her own terms.
But she climbed out of her bedroom window last night. Didn’t think I heard her—I’ve learned to sleep light, always half-listening for sounds from Mom’s room—but I heard the soft scrape of the frame, the rustle of her leather jacket.
She was gone for three hours.
Came back smelling like weed and something else I couldn’t identify. Climbed back through her window like she’d never left. Like she doesn’t know I’m always,alwayslistening for her.
I can’t ask about it. Can’t demand to know where she goes or what she does because we’re not… what are we, exactly? Stepsiblings who cross lines we shouldn’t? Kids playing house in the spaces between propriety and disaster?
Besides, Harper doesn’t respond well to demands. She responds to patience. To space. To proving through action that I’m not going anywhere.
So I give her space during the day. Let her breathe. Let her come to me when she’s ready.
And I spend my nights listening for her at the bathroom door.
CALEB: One more day. Then it’s our getaway. Lake house. Just us.
I hit send before I can overthink it.
The lake house. I booked it three weeks ago with money I’ve been saving from tutoring gigs and a part-time job at the library. A long weekend in Waco, where we can disappear completely. No more quick kisses stolen in hallways or my bedroom. No more watching every word, every gesture, every moment we’re in the same room together.
Just us. No performance. No masks.
I know I’ve been a goddamn zombie lately. Since Mom’s cancer came back—recurred, Dr. Park’s clinical voice in my head,not ‘came back’—I’ve been running on autopilot. Going through the motions. Harper’s taken everything in stride, never complaining when I’m too exhausted for conversation, never pushing when I shut down.
She deserves better than the ghost I’ve been.
So I planned the perfect weekend. Couples massages—her first ever, she admitted when I told her, eyes wide like I’d offered her the moon. A jacuzzi overlookingthe water. Privacy. No parents, no school, no cancer appointments haunting the periphery.
A weekend where perfect doesn’t matter and I can finally,finallyjust exist in her orbit without all the scaffolding I’ve built to hold myself upright.
The bell rings, sharp and intrusive.
I head to third period, checking my phone in the passing period between classroom doors and lockers slamming.
SILAS: Knock ’em dead today, kiddo. Your mom would be so proud.
I freeze.
The hallway keeps moving around me—students streaming past, voices rising and falling—but I’m stuck. Paralyzed.
Would be.