Chapter 3 Arrivals #2
He looked at the ceiling. “I don't know. Yesterday, maybe.”
I turned toward the kitchen before I could stand there any longer cataloging how much weight he'd lost. “Sit down. I'll make you food.”
“You don't have to do that.”
“I know I don't have to.”
“Then don't.”
“Sit down.”
He made a sound that was pure frustration, but I heard him drop onto the couch.
I pulled out the ingredients and started building a sandwich that had actual substance to it, turkey and cheese and the good bread Mara had badgered me into buying.
I could feel Troy watching me from the living room, his gaze a steady weight between my shoulder blades.
I finished the sandwich, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and walked back into the living room.
He was sprawled against the cushions with his head tipped back, looking more worn out than he had at the airport, which I hadn't thought was possible.
I handed him the plate and the bottle. He took them and looked at the food like he was deciding whether accepting it meant conceding a point.
“Eat,” I said.
“Bossy.”
“Concerned. There's a difference.”
He ate. Three bites in, he stopped trying to look like he wasn't hungry and just ate, putting away the whole sandwich in under two minutes and washing it down with half the beer. Then he leaned back with an expression that was almost human.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Yeah.”
I sat down in the chair across from him and kept the distance deliberate.
The couch felt too close, too much like the nights years ago when we'd watched whatever was on and I'd spent the whole time telling myself the way I noticed him was just normal parental concern and not the beginning of a problem I'd spend years trying to bury.
“You planning on telling me why you're actually here?” I asked.
His expression closed up. “Does it matter?”
“Yeah. It does.”
“Why?”
“Because you haven't been home in six years. You call me out of nowhere saying you need time away, and I'm supposed to just take that at face value.”
“Isn't that what you're doing?”
“I'm asking, aren't I.”
He turned the beer bottle in his hands, picking at the label. “I needed to get out of London for a while. That's the truth.”
“That's a part of the truth.”
“It's the part you're getting tonight.”
I held his gaze. He didn't flinch from it, just stared back with the flat steadiness that meant he'd already decided how much he was going to give me and wasn't interested in renegotiating.
“I thought that's what you wanted,” he said. “Me out of your life. Out of your way.”
“You think I wanted that.”
“Could've fooled me.”
“I let you leave because you needed to go. That's not the same as wanting you gone.”
“Same result, though.” He shrugged, a dismissiveness in it that was practiced enough to be a habit. “You didn't call. I didn't call. We went six years without talking like two adults who'd decided it was easier that way.”
“You went eight months without answering my texts.”
His jaw tightened. “I was busy.”
“For eight months.”
“Yeah.”
“Right.”
“Don't do that either.”
“Do what?”
“The quiet disappointed thing. I liked the arguing better.”
“I'm not disappointed.” It came out steadier than I felt. “I'm trying to understand what the hell happened to us.”
That landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. I saw it in the way his eyes shifted, just for a second, before the wall went back up. “Nothing happened. People grow up and move on. That's all it was.”
“That's all.”
“Yeah.”
It wasn't, and we both knew it, but I let it lie. He was tired and I was too close to saying things that couldn't be unsaid, and the night was still young enough to ruin.
“I'm tired,” Troy said, finally. “Can we not do this tonight?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We can table it.”
He stood, grabbed his bag, and headed for the stairs. I watched him go, the set of his shoulders, the careful distance he kept from everything in the room.
At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. He didn't turn around right away, just stood there with his hand on the newel post like he was deciding whether to keep moving or say the thing he was clearly turning over.
Then he looked back.
“Declan.”
“Yeah.”
“It's good to see you.” A short pause. “Even if I'm shit at showing it.”
Before I could get a single word out, he was up the stairs and gone. The guest room door closed with a quiet click that landed harder than it had any right to.
I sat there in the living room for a long time after. The house felt different with him in it, smaller and more alive at the same time, like it had been holding its breath for years and could finally let go.
I'd missed him. Not the abstract idea of him but the actual man.
His stubbornness. His anger. His refusal to make a single thing easy when it could be complicated instead.
And I was already losing the thread of whatever plan I'd had for getting through his return intact.
Already letting him see too much. Already making the selfish, necessary mistakes I'd told myself I wouldn't make.
This was going to wreck me. I could feel it settling in the same way I felt it in a fight when I knew I was outmatched and couldn't make myself step back from it.
I finished my beer, cleaned up the kitchen, and headed upstairs to my own room. Troy's door was closed, no light showing underneath. Either he'd crashed the second he hit the mattress, or he was lying there in the dark trying to figure out how badly he'd miscalculated by coming back here.
I knew that feeling.
I'd spent six years building a life that didn't include him. Telling myself the distance was fine, that letting him go had been the right call, that I was handling it. And it had taken less than an hour for all of that to fall apart at the seams.
He was back. And I was already in trouble.