Chapter 1
One
One year ago
Rowan
Piper’s car is parked crooked in the driveway.
That’s how I know.
The front door is unlatched, so I push it open with my shoulder, kick my shoes off without looking, and step inside. My keys bite into my palm hard enough to leave dents.
The house is blazing with light. Every lamp is on. Every window glows against the dark street outside like the place is trying to warn the neighborhood.
Then the smell hits me.
Bleach.
So much bleach my eyes sting.
Piper’s voice carries from the living room. “Mom, please just sit down.”
My stomach drops.
I round the corner and stop dead.
The sofa has been shoved into the middle of the room, crooked on the rug. Mom is on her hands and knees scrubbing the hardwood floors with frantic, jerking movements even though the floor is already spotless.
Dad stands near the hallway looking helpless in a way I can’t process right now.
Piper is folded into herself at the edge of the couch, white as paper.
And Madison still isn’t here.
The air feels wrong without her. Like we’re all waiting for the real adult to arrive.
I’m suddenly hyperaware of my own body. My hands. My breathing. The fact that everyone keeps looking at me like I walked in carrying answers.
I’m twenty-five years old. I lose parking tickets and forget to buy milk. I have never once known what to do in a situation like this.
The door thuds behind me, and Mom spins so fast it makes me dizzy.
Madison walks in without looking at me, her focus already on the living room. She’s wearing that mask she wears when everything is about to fall apart.
Relief hits me so sharply I almost sway with it.
I move immediately, crossing to Piper and pulling her into the kitchen because she’s shaking so hard I can see it from across the room. The second I touch her, she folds into me like a little kid.
“Madi,” Piper whispers, her voice cracking apart.
“I’ve got it,” Madison says, but her voice already sounds strained around the edges.
She crouches in front of Mom. “Mom, stop. Look at me.”
Mom doesn’t stop scrubbing.
“The nursery, Madison,” she says frantically. “We didn’t prepare the nursery. The baby is coming, and the floors are filthy. Arthur won’t help. He just stands there, but it has to be perfect. Everything has to be perfect.”
Piper makes a tiny broken sound against my shoulder.
“Mom,” Madison says carefully, like she’s diffusing a bomb. “There is no baby. Piper’s wedding is soon, remember? There is no baby.”
She reaches down to pull Mom upright.
And then everything detonates.
Mom lunges at her so suddenly Piper gasps beside me. Her fingers clamp around Madison’s forearms hard enough that I know it’ll bruise.
“You don’t understand!” Mom shrieks. Her eyes are huge and unfocused, darting around the room like she’s seeing things none of us can. “You’re always trying to stop me. You’re just like them. You want to keep me in the dark!”
“Mom, let go of me!” Madison struggles to steady her.
Hot fear crawls up my throat.
“She needs help,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds smaller than I want it to. “We have to call the hospital. We have to get her back on a ward.”
Mom recoils from me like I slapped her.
“No!” she screams.
The sound slices straight through me.
“Not back there. I won’t go back. Arthur, tell them! Don’t let them take me!”
Dad finally moves, stepping forward to cradle her face in his hands. “You’re not going anywhere, sweetheart.”
Madison looks at him then, and I physically watch something inside her snap. “Did you give her the meds, Dad?” she demands. Exhaustion bleeds through every word. “You said you gave them to her. Piper, Rowan, you two were here. You told me she was fine.”
Piper jerks beside me like she’s been slapped too.
“She said she took them,” Piper cries. “She told us she was fine. We didn’t know. We haven’t seen her like this in years.”
“Because I shielded you!” Madison’s voice cracks through the room. “I stayed here while you went to school. I handled the doctors. You didn’t see it because I didn’t let you.”
Silence crashes down.
I stare at her. At the fury on her face, and the grief underneath it.
Suddenly every missing piece of our childhood rearranges itself into something uglier.
All those weekends Madison couldn’t visit me at university.
All the nights she sounded tired on the phone.
All the times she brushed things off with a joke.
She wasn’t living a life while the rest of us escaped.
She was surviving this.
Guilt punches clean through my ribs.
Madison drags a hand over her face. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “That wasn’t fair.”
Mom has started pacing the hallway now, muttering to herself.
“The light,” she whispers. “The arrival.”
Every hair on my arms lifts.
Madison follows her upstairs, and for one horrible second I consider following too, but my feet stay rooted to the kitchen tiles.
Coward.
Piper still has a death grip on my hand.
We hear muffled voices overhead.
Then Madison again. “Mom, please. Just tell me. Have you been taking the pills?”
Mom’s voice drifts faintly down the stairs. “I’m happy, Madison. Don’t you want me to be happy? The pills make the world gray. They make my head heavy. I’ve had so many good days lately. I’m finally awake.”
Piper starts crying harder.
I close my eyes because part of me understands.
A few seconds later, we hear drawers opening upstairs.
“Madison, don’t! Stay out of there!”
The silence that follows is long enough to make my pulse pound.
When Madison finally reappears at the top of the stairs, she looks destroyed.
She’s holding orange pill bottles in one hand and they’re all full.
My stomach turns violently.
“Mom,” Madison chokes out.
Mom’s voice shifts then. She sounds almost lucid.
“I felt good. I thought I was cured. I wanted to feel the sun, Madi. Just for a little while.”
The grief that hits the room is physical, like another person stepped inside carrying it.
I can’t breathe properly.
I think about every time Mom braided my hair before school.
Every time she danced in the kitchen.
Every Christmas morning.
And how terrifying it is that a brain can become something you lose control of. That your own mind can betray you while you’re still trapped inside it.
Dad’s voice comes next. “We’re not committing her,” he says firmly.
Madison laughs once. Except it isn’t laughter. It’s disbelief.
“She’s in a full-blown manic episode, Dad. She hasn’t slept. She’s not safe.”
“I won’t sign the papers.”
That stubborn Callahan streak digs in.
I hate it.
“What if she gets worse?” Madison asks. “What if she hurts herself?”
Dad says nothing.
Piper finally whispers the question I don’t have an answer for. “What do we do?”
Madison comes into the kitchen and we both look at her.
The fixer.
The parent.
The one who knows how to survive this.
I watch her pull out her phone with shaking hands.
Our brother Noah answers on the second ring. I can hear his voice faintly through the speaker. “I’m booking the next flight. I’ll be there tonight.”
“I need help now,” Madison whispers.
“Do what you have to do. I trust you.”
Something about that almost undoes me because Madison sounds so tired.
She hangs up and disappears into the hallway.
For a second, nobody moves.
Then I hear another call connect.
“Madi?” a man answers.
Madison makes this broken sound that barely qualifies as a word.
“Beckett,” she whispers.
There’s a long pause, then his voice softens completely. “Talk to me, baby.”
I stare at the floor while my sister falls apart quietly in the next room.
And for the first time in my life, I realize Madison was never carrying this because she was strong enough.
She was carrying it because nobody else did.
∞∞∞
Madison called Beckett.
Beckett is a trauma doctor and I’m pretty sure she’s sleeping with him.
Apparently, when things go wrong in your living room, you don’t call 911. You call someone who knows how to step into madness without making it worse.
Beckett called a friend of his who is also a psychiatrist. Someone who could come over and handle my mother without turning it into flashing lights and neighbors watching from behind curtains.
They’ve been upstairs for over an hour. Long enough for the adrenaline to burn out. Long enough for the house to settle into that eerie, fragile quiet that follows something breaking.
The front door opens and clicks shut behind me.
I don’t turn, but I hear measured footsteps on the gravel.
I shift slightly, just enough to see him through the dark.
He’s already halfway down the path.
He’s tall and broad, navy slacks and shirt still sharp despite the hour he’s just spent inside. He looks like he belongs somewhere controlled. Somewhere quiet. Not here. Not in this.
He reaches his black SUV, opens the back door, and sets a black medical case inside.
Then he pauses and looks straight at me like he clocked me the second he stepped outside and was just giving me a minute to speak first.
I don’t.
So he does. “Are you alright?”
My eyebrows lift before I can stop them. “Are you alright?”
No reaction. Not even a flicker.
“You’re Madison’s sister.”
“What gave it away?” I ask. “The red hair?”
It comes out sharper than it needs to, but I don’t take it back.
Politeness requires energy. I don’t have any left.
My joints ache. My head is heavy. My mother is upstairs, sedated into something that passes for peace.
He turns fully toward me, slipping his hands into his pockets like this is a normal conversation and not… whatever this is.
I straighten.
It doesn’t do much.
I’m five-four. He’s… definitely not.
He stops a few feet away, close enough that I can see his eyes. They’re pale blue and piercing.
“Your mother is sleeping,” he says, his voice calm.
“I know.” The gravel shifts under my shoe when I move. “She always sleeps after she breaks.”
I don’t know why I tell him that. It just comes out.
“That’s normal,” he says.
I look up at him properly this time. “None of this is normal.”
“She has bipolar. This is her normal.”
It lands too easily, and not something that just tore through our house an hour ago.
I shake my head, kicking another stone. “So what? You just medicate her until she’s sane again?”
“With the right medication,” he says evenly, “she can live a normal life.”
I gesture back toward the house. “She was on the right medication. That’s what the last guy said.”
He doesn’t argue. He just stands there, solid, like my frustration isn’t something he needs to carry.
“It’s not unusual to need a change,” he says. “It’s trial and error.”
I fold my arms tighter across myself. “Are you her new doctor?”
“No.” A beat. “This was a favor for Beckett. Your mother already has a team.”
I understand what it means.
He didn’t have to come.
“Thanks,” I say finally. “For helping her.”
He dips his chin once and turns back to the car.
Just before he gets in, he pauses and looks at me. “You should probably have Beckett take a look at your leg.”
My head snaps up. “Excuse me?”
“You’re avoiding putting weight on it,” he says, glancing down briefly before meeting my eyes again. “Get it checked.”
Heat flashes up my spine.
I straighten instinctively, putting weight down just to prove a point. “I thought you were a psychiatrist.”
“I am.”
He slides into the seat. “I notice things.” The door starts to close, then he stops it with one hand. “Goodnight, littlest Callahan.”
I blink at him.
“Hey—”
The door shuts, the engine turns over, and he’s gone.
I stay where I am longer than I mean to.
The cold creeps in slowly, settling into my bones.
Littlest Callahan?
I exhale.
I fucking hate that name.
And I hate that he noticed.
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