Chapter 14 #2
“Let me see it,” I said.
He looked at me for a second. Then he tilted his head toward the hallway.
Poppy's room was what I'd have expected from the youngest sibling of a musician — drum practice pad on the desk, concert posters on the walls, a corkboard covered in photos and paper scraps and a sticky note that just said don't be a coward in her own handwriting.
She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open and a notebook in her lap and she looked up when Soren appeared in the doorway.
Then she clocked me behind him and her expression recalibrated fast.
“Rook knows things,” Soren said, by way of explanation. “Show him.”
She turned the laptop around.
The thesis statement was for a paper on the social consequences of the first world war, and it was actually not bad — she had an argument, she had a scope, she was trying to be specific.
But the framing was backwards, leading with the most general claim and burying the most interesting specific point at the end of the sentence.
“Flip it,” I said. “Your strongest claim is the last clause. Lead with that.”
She looked at the screen. “Which clause?”
I pointed. She read it again. Her face changed — that specific shift that happened when a thing that had been sitting slightly wrong finally resolved itself.
“Oh,” she said.
“You had the right idea. You just buried the good part.”
She was already retyping, muttering slightly to herself, and Soren was leaning against the doorframe watching with an expression I couldn't fully read. I looked at him and he looked quickly back at his sister.
“Read it back,” I said to Poppy.
She read it back. It was better. She knew it was better before she finished the sentence.
“Okay,” she said, and she looked up at me with the assessing look again, slightly recalibrated now. “You're really helpful.”
“Don't sound so surprised.”
“Soren's helpful too but he doesn't know history.”
“I know history,” Soren said from the doorway.
“You know music history. It's not the same.”
“The French Revolution had a significant impact on—”
“That's not what the paper's about, Soren.”
I looked at Soren. He pointed at Poppy with his mug. “She starts arguments and then changes the subject when she's losing.”
“I'm not losing, I'm redirecting.” She was back to typing. “Thank you, Rook.”
“Good luck with it.”
She was already halfway into the next paragraph and had apparently concluded we were done, which we were.
Micah flagged us down on the way back through the hallway.
He was sitting on his bedroom floor surrounded by the colour-coded flashcard situation Soren had described, which was as bad as advertised — four different colours of card, three separate piles, and what appeared to be a supplementary system of sticky notes that had been added to the original system and then started developing its own internal logic.
“It's organic,” Micah said, when he saw me looking at it.
“It's a second system inside the first system,” I said. “At a certain point you're just making more work.”
“The colours mean different things.”
“What does orange mean?”
Micah looked at the orange cards. “I forget.”
Soren made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
I crouched down and looked at the spread of it properly. It was for a sociology course — he had the right material, organised well enough conceptually, but the physical execution was fighting him. “What's the exam format?”
“Short answer and one long essay.”
“Then you don't need five categories. You need two. Things you know well enough to apply and things you're still shaky on. Everything else is noise.”
Micah looked at the cards. Then at me. “That's so much simpler than what I've been doing.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn't I think of that.”
“You were too inside it.” I straightened up. “Sort them tonight, run through the shaky pile twice before you sleep, check the good pile once in the morning. You'll be fine.”
Micah started pulling cards into two piles. “Are you always this direct?”
“I'm told it's a problem.”
“I like it.” He was sorting fast, occasionally holding a card up and making a face that put it in the shaky pile. “Soren should've brought you around earlier.”
“I'm right here,” Soren said.
“I know. I'm telling Rook.” Micah looked up briefly. “He said you played hockey with him in high school.”
“He was the best player on the team,” I said.
Micah glanced at his brother. “You always said you were decent.”
“I was being modest.”
“You were being Soren,” I said. “Which is the same thing, but in the other direction.”
Soren looked at me over his mug with an expression that was trying to be unimpressed and not getting there. “You want more coffee or are you just here to undermine me in my own home?”
“Both,” I said. “Multitasking.”
Micah's grin spread across his face, the first fully unguarded expression I'd seen from him all evening, and in it I could see the nine-year-old he'd been — the kid hiding under the table, watching everything carefully from the safest vantage point available.
“I like him,” he said, to no one specifically. “He can stay.”
We ended up in the living room.
Poppy had migrated out from her bedroom with her laptop once the thesis statement had been sorted, operating on the logic that the common space was now open for business.
She installed herself in the corner of the couch and settled in.
Micah came through to make tea, went back, came through again, eventually gave up and just sat on the floor with his flashcards and a second donut.
Soren sat at the other end of the couch from Poppy with his sock feet on the coffee table and his coffee going cold on the side table because he kept forgetting it was there.
He'd let his guard down over the last hour in the way I recognised — the careful watchfulness from the door gone, replaced by something looser.
He wasn't making anything look easier than it was. He just was.
I sat in the armchair across from them and watched the three of them exist in each other's orbit and tried to identify what I was feeling, which turned out to be something I didn't have a clean word for.
Micah asked Poppy something about her paper and she answered without looking up, and he argued mildly with her answer and she told him he was wrong with easy, years-deep affection, the kind that had its own shorthand.
Soren interjected once with a third opinion that they both dismissed simultaneously, which made him grin at his own mug.
They'd built a whole language between them.
I thought about what Soren had said in the kitchen. The scholarship. The music program. The timing that didn't care what you wanted.
He'd been eighteen when everything detonated.
Scholarship in hand and three younger siblings and parents who had made themselves unavailable in every way that counted.
And he'd looked at what was in front of him and he had chosen this.
Not because someone forced him. Because he had decided they mattered more than the version of his life that might have been.
Poppy said something funny from the couch and Micah threw a flashcard at her and she caught it without looking up, and Soren laughed.
I looked at the three of them.
He had made all of this. Out of nothing, out of chaos and debt and years of holding the walls up with his bare hands.
He had made a home where these people felt safe enough to argue about thesis statements and throw flashcards and eat cold pizza on a Thursday evening and assume he would be there when they needed him.
I'd spent my entire adult life being responsible. I'd been quietly proud of that. Considered it a thing I'd built.
Looking at Soren's living room, I understood I'd had no idea what building something actually took.
“You're staring,” Soren said, without looking at me.
“I'm thinking.”
“About what?”
I picked up my coffee and drank the last of it, which had gone cold. “Nothing. What time does Talia get back?”
He checked his phone. “Forty minutes. Why?”
“Just making sure I'm not here when she walks in at the end of a long day and has to deal with an unexpected person in her living room.”
“Talia likes you.”
“Talia tolerates me and the last time we met I was carrying her unconscious brother, which is a specific set of conditions that makes most people civil.”
“She'll be glad you came,” he said, and there was something in the delivery that meant him as much as her.
Poppy looked up from her laptop. “Are you coming back?” she asked, straight out, the way she did everything.
“If I'm invited,” I said.
She considered this. “You helped with my thesis statement and you fixed Micah's card situation in four minutes, so I think you've earned a standing invitation.” She looked at Soren. “He's earned a standing invitation.”
“You don't run the building,” Soren said.
“I'm saying what I think.”
“You're always saying what you think, Poppy. That's not a rare occurrence.”
“It's efficient.” She was back to her laptop. “Rook, you have a standing invitation.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Bring donuts next time.”
“Poppy,” Soren said.
“What? It's a reasonable request. Donuts from the College Street place. Not the grocery store kind.”
“I'll keep that in mind,” I said.
From the floor, Micah said, without looking up from his flashcards, “And the chocolate. He should bring the chocolate.”
“I'm surrounded by opportunists,” Soren told his coffee mug.
“You raised us,” Poppy said.
He had no response to that, which seemed like a fair outcome.
I left at twenty past eight.
Soren walked me to the door, and we stood in the hallway outside the apartment for a moment in the particular way that meant neither of us was quite ready to close the distance to a goodbye.
“Thank you for helping them,” he said. “You didn't have to do that.”
“I wanted to.” I meant it.
He had his arms loosely crossed and his shoulder leaned against the doorframe and he looked good doing it.
“The degree,” he said. “Engineering. I want to go back and look that up.”
“Look it up?”
“You.” The corner of his mouth pulled up. “I want to see the picture.”
“There's no picture.”
“There's always a picture.”
“Soren—”
“Graduation gown, little hat, holding the certificate.” He was fully smiling now. “It exists somewhere and I'm going to find it.”
“I'll have it destroyed.”
“You will absolutely not.”
I held his eyes for a second. He held mine. The hallway was quiet except for the faint sound of the television through the closed door and somewhere below us a neighbour's dinner still smelling like cumin and garlic.
“Go home, Rook.” He smiled.
“Bossy.”
He laughed before going back inside. I heard the lock turn and then the sound of Poppy saying something and Soren answering and Micah's laugh coming through the door muffled and genuine.
I stood there for a second longer than I needed to.