Chapter 12
Hours earlier
Margot calls at three.
I'm in the kitchen making tea—the kind she taught me, loose leaf, the strainer she bought at a flea market when I was seventeen that she's convinced makes everything taste better. The phone buzzes against the counter and her name lights the screen.
"Hi, sweetheart."
"Hey, Mom." Her voice balms my soul.
"I'm just checking in. It is so beautiful up here, sweetheart, the leaves are just starting to turn. Richard's downstairs at the bar pretending he knows something about Connecticut wine."
"Does he?"
"He absolutely does not. But he's happy, so."
I smile.
"Have you eaten?" she asks. I roll my eyes.
"I'll find something."
"Max."
"I'll eat, Mom. I kind of have to, to survive. And believe it or not I do feel hunger. Don't stress about me."
A beat. The sound of her shifting the phone to the other ear.
"I can't help it, Maxie. It's what I do.
" A breath. "You're doing so much better now.
I can see it. I can hear it in your voice, even—you sound like yourself again.
But for a while there, sweetheart..." She trails off.
Picks it back up quieter. "For a while there I was really worried about you.
The end of the spring. The way you stopped eating.
You disappeared. You'd go to your room at seven o'clock and I wouldn't hear you move for the rest of the night.
I didn't say anything because I didn't want to push, but I was scared, Max. I was really scared."
"Mom—"
"I know. I know you're okay now. I can see it. That's not what I'm saying." Another breath. "What I'm saying is—your happiness is everything to me. You know that, right? I would do whatever it takes to keep you safe. Whatever it takes. I need you to hear me say that."
"I hear you."
"Good." A breath. "Because I mean it, sweetheart. There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do. Nothing I wouldn't give up. If it came down to it—if I ever had to choose between what was comfortable and what was right for you—I wouldn't hesitate. Not for a second."
I hold the tea strainer over the cup and don't pour.
She means it. That's the thing about Margot—she doesn't say things like this unless she's been carrying them for a while, and she's been carrying this one long enough that it came out on a phone call from a hotel in Connecticut.
She probably preferred it this way than to see me roll my eyes.
"Mom. I'm okay."
"I know you are."
"Then why does this feel like a speech?"
She laughs. Short, wet at the edges. "Because I'm dramatic. And because we’ve been gone long enough that I missed my baby boy and wanted to tell him how much I love him before I spend forty-eight hours pretending to enjoy a vineyard tour."
I smile. "You like wine."
"I like drinking wine. I do not like hearing about the soil it grew in for forty-five minutes while a man in a vest points at dirt."
"That sounds like a lot of dirt."
"It's Connecticut, sweetheart. It's all dirt and opinions."
"Go. Have fun. Enjoy your anniversary. Love you."
"Love you, sweetheart. Whatever it takes."
She hangs up. I pour my tea. I stand in the kitchen for a minute holding the mug in both hands and letting the words sit in me the way her words always sit in me—warm, heavy, true.
Whatever it takes.
I don't know what she means by it. I file it where I file everything she gives me: in the place behind my ribs where the good things live, next to the orange juice and the lemonade pitcher and the night she drove three hours to pick me up from a foster home and didn't ask a single question until I was ready.
Whatever it takes. Okay, Mom. Okay.
∞∞∞
The notebook is open on my thigh.
I'm in the lounge. The window seat—the big one, floor to ceiling, that faces the side of the house where the light goes gold in the evenings.
I've been here for an hour. The house is empty—Margot and Richard in Connecticut, the brothers gone since early afternoon without telling me where.
Bane's shirt is too big on me. My feet are bare.
My tea went cold twenty minutes ago and I haven't gotten up to fix it because the words are coming and when the words come I don't move.
I write:
I keep waiting for the part where it stops feeling impossible.
Not the bond. The bond makes sense now—the hum in my chest, the three threads, the way I can feel them even when they're gone. That part I understand. That part I've stopped fighting.
It's the rest of it. The part where I'm sitting in a window seat in a house that belongs to my stepfather wearing my stepbrother's shirt writing in a notebook about how in love I am with all three of his sons.
That part. The part where I know exactly what I am and who I belong to and the sentence sounds insane from the outside and feels like the truest thing I've ever—
The front door clicks.
I stop writing. My pen hovers over the page. The bond in my chest shifts—three threads, all at once, going from distant-steady to close-and-wrong in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
They're home.
Wrong. Something happened.
I close the notebook. Set it on the window seat. Stand.
The foyer is a floor down and I can hear them from here—the door shutting, keys in the bowl, the specific weight of three sets of footsteps I've learned to tell apart.
Atlas's are even. Measured. The same interval between each step regardless of his mood.
Bane's are slightly heavier on the left—he favors that side when he's tired.
Zero's are the quietest, always, because Zero walks like he’s spent his whole life practicing how not to be heard.
Tonight all three sets are wrong.
Atlas is too slow. Bane is too heavy on both sides. Zero is loud.
I go downstairs.
They're in the front hall. Atlas has his back to me, hanging his jacket on the hook by the door.
The motion is mechanical—left arm out, jacket off, hook, done—like he's running a program.
Bane is beside the side table with his hand flat on the surface, not leaning on it exactly, just touching it.
Anchoring. Zero is at the foot of the stairs with his hands in his pockets and his jaw set in the way it sets when he's burning something down inside his own head.
"Hey," I say from the landing.
Three faces turn to me.
I read them the way I've learned to read them—not with my eyes, with the bond.
Three threads going taut in my chest at once.
Atlas's is tight and flat, the bass note gone dull, the vibration wrong.
Bane's is heavy—weighted, like someone hung something on it that it wasn't built to carry.
Zero's is hot. Not the good hot. The dangerous hot.
The hot that comes before the thing he does that scares people.
"What happened?" I ask, panic lacing through my veins.
"Nothing," Atlas says. He doesn't turn all the way around. He's adjusting his jacket on the hook. Still adjusting it. It's been on the hook for ten seconds and he's still adjusting it.
"Atlas."
"Long day. It's handled."
"It doesn't feel handled." I swallow against the lump forming in my throat.
"Max." Bane. His voice is too gentle. The voice he uses when he's trying to steer me away from something. "Come here."
I come down the rest of the stairs. Bare feet on the wood. I stop at the bottom and look at them—really look—and I know all three of them are carrying something heavy. Something dark.
"I can feel it," I say. "In the bond. All three of you. Something happened and you're not going to tell me, are you?"
Zero's eyes are on me. Dark. The pupils slightly too wide. His hands are still in his pockets but his shoulders are high and tight and I can see the vein at his temple.
"No," he says. Flat. "We're not."
"Zero—"
"Not tonight, baby."
The way he says it stops me. Not the words—the weight underneath them. The baby that isn't a tease or a claim. It's a please. Zero doesn't say please with his mouth. He makes me feel it.
I look at Bane. He's watching me closely, his pupils blown wide in his warm eyes.
I look at Atlas. He's finally turned from the jacket.
His face is composed. His tie is loosened.
His eyes are the wrong color—not literally, but the thing behind them has shifted, the blue-grey gone flat and distant, and the bond between us is doing something I haven't felt from him before.
A kind of low continuous ache. Like a bruise being pressed.
"Okay," I say, my voice lowering to a whisper. "You don't have to tell me."
I cross the foyer. I go to Atlas first because Atlas is the one whose bond is aching, and I put my hands on his chest—both palms, flat, over his heart—and I stand there.
I don't say anything. I don't ask anything.
I just press my hands into him until I feel the thread between us ease a fraction.
His breathing changes. His hand comes up and covers both of mine. Holds them there.
"Hi, sweetheart," he says. Quiet. Wrecked.
"Hi."
I turn to Bane. He's watching. I hold out my hand. He takes it. His fingers are cold—Bane's fingers are never cold—and I pull him closer and press his hand against the bond mark at my throat, his mark, and the thread between us flares warm. He exhales through his nose. Slow.
I look at Zero. He hasn't moved. Still at the foot of the stairs. Still burning.
"Come here," I say.
"Max—"
"Come here. You’re too far."
He cuts the distance between us. His hands come out of his pockets. I take one—the right one, the one with the knuckles that are calloused beyond healing—and I bring it to my mouth and press my lips against the split skin.
Three threads. All three.
The bond between the four of us goes wide and warm and full, and I hold it there—Atlas's hands over mine on his chest, Bane's palm on my throat, Zero's knuckles against my mouth—and I think: I know it's bad. I know something is wrong. I'm choosing this anyway. I'm choosing all of you.
Zero breaks first.