Chapter 10
brOOKLYN
She made it to her quarters before the shaking started. She counted that as a win.
You took your wins where you found them, and lately she was rationing.
The lift had been bad.
She wasn’t going to think about the lift.
She’d stood in it alone and let exactly four seconds of it out.
The aftermath of standing on a public floor with a hostile man and a running camera, defending eight months of her life to people who’d already decided she was a traitor for the crime of being good at her job.
Four seconds.
Then she’d put it away, because the lift had doors that opened onto a corridor where anyone could see.
She’d walked to her quarters at a normal pace with her face doing nothing at all.
The door sealed behind her.
The good part of her life closed around her.
The rug, the plants, the wall of mismatched frames, her grandmother’s blanket folded over the chair.
The image that said this person is fine, this person is more than fine.
She stood in the middle of it and let herself have the shaking. The room was hers and nobody was watching and she’d earned four more seconds.
Then her comm chimed.
Not HOME.
Not the flat grey letters she’d braced her whole life against. The ones that came on a fourth ring with a graceful sidestep and a number she’d already earned. Not her mother, calling to hand her a bill in a bright loose voice.
DANNY
Her stomach did something worse than it had ever done for HOME.
Danny didn’t call.
Danny messaged, three awkward lines, in the wrong time zone, days late.
When had Danny ever called her out of nothing?
The one relationship in her life that had never cost her more than it gave did not ring her comm.
Not at the exact hour she’d walked off a public floor with her hands not steady.
She answered before the second chime, which she had never done for anyone.
“Danny. What’s wrong.”
“Hey.” His voice was careful.
Nineteen and gentle and doing the thing she did, she realized. Flattening it, taking the shake out, making it safe to hand over.
Hearing her own trick come back at her from her little brother put a crack in something before he’d said anything at all. “So. Um. I need to ask you something and I need you to not do the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you handle it before I finish the sentence.” A breath, from the bottom of the sky.
“The tuition portal locked me out this morning. Said the account funding source was flagged. So I called the bank. And they—” His voice did a small thing.
He steadied it. “They walked me through the custodial account. The whole history. Since I was nine, Brooke. Every deposit.”
The floor tilted.
He’d seen it.
Not the number her mother would have named on a fourth ring, softened and sidestepped and wrapped in you’re so good about it.
The history.
Every deposit.
Every quiet stubborn one, made out of noodle dinners she hadn’t eaten and raises she’d never spent, going in on a schedule for years.
And then the withdrawals.
The scoop of it.
The hollowing, dated and itemized.
A car and a rough patch and a man named Gary rendered as a bank’s flat honest ledger.
Laid in front of the one person she had spent her entire life making sure never had to see it.
“Danny—”
“It’s mostly gone,” he said. “The account. I did the math. I’m good at math, you taught me, remember, you used to—” and there it was, the crack in his, the one he’d been flattening, “—and it doesn’t add up to four years.
It doesn’t add up to two. And every single deposit is yours.
Every one. There’s not one that isn’t yours.
I always thought—Mom always said we were managing it together, she said it like—and I looked at it and it’s all you, Brooke, it’s been all you since I was a kid, and you never—”
“Danny, listen to me—”
“You never said.” And he wasn’t flattening it anymore.
He was nineteen and he’d found out in a bank’s cold ledger what his sister had been quietly doing for a decade, and what their mother had quietly undone.
And he was doing the one thing nobody in that family ever did, which was let it show.
“Why didn’t you say. I would’ve—I don’t know what I would’ve done, I’m nineteen, but I would’ve known, I wouldn’t have let you just—you let me think it was fine.
You let me sleep in the library rather than ask you and I was asking you the whole time, I just didn’t know I was—”
And Brooklyn, who handled everything, who fixed centrifuges and routed money straight to portals so it couldn’t go anywhere else, who had built herself around being the one who carried it so no one else ever had to see the weight, was ready to pull everything in again.
To hold it together for herself. For her brother. Like she had since she was nineteen.
I’ve got a system, Danny, don’t worry about the account, it’s handled, read your book, go to sleep.
The whole practiced architecture, right there, ready, one sentence from being back in the room and correct.
It wasn’t there.
She reached again, the way you reach for a rail that’s always been there and your hand closes on air.
Her body understood half a second before her mind did that she was going to fall.
Because she could close the door on a hostile man and a running camera.
She could close it on her mother on a fourth ring.
She had thirty-one years of closing it on every single person who’d ever had a use for her.
She could not close it on Danny asking why didn’t you say.
Because Danny had never had a use for her.
Not like everyone else.
Everyone else wanted something.
Her mother wanted the good one, the station wanted the person who knew the process, the camera wanted the traitor scientist, and even the blue-haired guard had wanted the winning move.
Danny didn’t want anything.
He’d found out she’d been carrying him for ten years and his first reaction wasn’t keep carrying me.
It was grief.
That she’d been alone under it.
That he hadn’t known to help.
Nobody had ever grieved for her before.
What was she supposed to do with that?
She didn’t have a system for it. There was no shim for this.
“Danny,” she said, and her voice came out wrong, came out cracked all the way across, not one corner. “I have to—give me a second.”
“Are you crying?” Alarm, immediate, gentle. “Brooke. Are you crying? I’ve never—you don’t—”
“I’m fine,” she said, automatically, the oldest word she owned.
She heard how it landed.
Heard it be a lie for the first time in front of the one person she’d never lied to about anything that mattered.
And it was the lie that finished it.
The word fine.
Thirty-one years of it.
She couldn’t get it to hold.
It just came apart in her mouth.
“You’re not,” Danny said, quiet and certain and nineteen. “You’re not fine. It’s okay. You don’t have to be, it’s just me.”
It’s just me.
The one person in the galaxy in front of whom she’d never had to be perfect.
And she’d made herself perfect for him hardest of all, for a decade, so he’d never have to know.
The wall she’d built to protect him was the exact wall that had kept him from ever once getting to protect her back.
She sat down.
Not on the chair.
On the floor, on the too-expensive rug, her back against the chair.
Her grandmother’s blanket slid off the arm and pooled half over her shoulder.
She put her free hand over her face. And with her little brother on the line from the far side of the atmosphere, for the first time since she was a child… she let him hear it.
She cried.
Not four rationed seconds.
Not one crack at one corner, held and hidden.
All of it.
The whole flood, eight months of it, thirty-one years of it, coming up out of her.
She had not let that happen in front of another living soul since she’d learned, small and in the dark, that crying where people could see just gave them one more thing to hold against you.
Danny didn’t hang up.
That was the part that undid her worst.
He didn’t try to fix it, didn’t hand her a number, didn’t do a single graceful sidestep.
He just stayed on the line and let her.
He said her name a couple of times, low.
He said I’ve got you, which was absurd.
He was nineteen and broke and stuck to a planet she could see out the window. What did he have to get her with? He said it anyway.
And it was the first time in her adult life that anyone had said it to her and meant I’m not going anywhere instead of now do the thing you’re good at.
“I’m covering it,” she managed, eventually, wet and wrecked. “All of it. Four years. You’re covered, I promise, I’ll—”
“I know you will.” A pause. “That’s not—Brooke, that’s not why I called.
I don’t care about the account. I mean I do, I’m furious, we’re going to talk about Mom, but that’s not—I called because I saw ten years of you carrying me by yourself and I couldn’t just message it, I had to hear you, I had to make sure you were—” His voice cracked again, clean through.
“—I needed to know if you were okay. Not the money. You. Nobody ever asks you that, do they.”
Brooklyn cried harder, because no.
No, they didn’t.
Not once.
Had one single being in the entire spinning galaxy ever just… wanted her to be okay?
For no reason. For nothing.
Because she mattered and not because she was good about it.
Except, apparently, a gentle nineteen-year-old with a book open face-down on his bed. Who had found out in a bank ledger what she’d done, and whose first thought had been is she okay.
“I’m not,” she said. The truth. She had never once said it to family and she said it to Danny on a floor with the blanket over her shoulder. “I’m not okay, Danny. I haven’t been okay for a really long time and I’ve been so—I’m so tired.”
“Okay,” Danny said softly. “Okay. Thank you. For telling me the real one.” A breath. “You don’t have to fix everything, you know. Some of it you can just tell me. I’m not a kid anymore. You can put some of it down.”
Later.
How much later?
She’d lost the clean crisp sense of time she was so proud of.
The call had ended, gently, the way you set down something that finally, finally didn’t break when you let go of it.
She was still on the floor, hollowed out.
Her face swollen, her breathing gone to the ragged post-storm hitch.
The blanket wrapped around her shoulders now like a child’s.
She should get up. She knew the next steps. The ones that she had to do to get on with it.
Wash your face, find the door, shut it, build the wall back, and by morning you’re fine, extremely fine, professional and correct.
That was the system.
Had the system ever once failed her?
But the system had also kept Danny in the dark for ten years. It was the reason a gentle boy had had to find out from a bank instead of from her.
Hadn’t she always told herself the wall protected the people she loved?
Tonight, wrung all the way out, she understood the thing she’d spent thirty-one years not looking at directly.
The wall didn’t protect them.
It just made sure that when she broke, she’d do it alone, where nobody who loved her could reach in and hold on.
And she was so, so tired of nobody ever being allowed to reach.
Her comm sat where she’d set it down, dark and quiet.
She looked at it for a long time.
There was only one being on this station built to feel what she was feeling right through a wall.
And he was the last person she could let feel it.
He’d matched her and bet on her and she’d shut the door in his face.
Except the door wasn’t there anymore. Danny had knocked it clean off the frame.
Did she have it in her to build it back tonight?
And this was the new thing, the terrifying thing.
Did she want to?
She stayed on the floor, wrapped in the one blanket that had ever been made for her by someone who wanted nothing back. She let herself be exactly as not-okay as she was.
There was a soft chime at her door.
Not the comm. The door.
Brooklyn went very still.