1. Emma #2
“You should have told me in person.” His jaw tightens on the screen. “Before you dropped me off at college, like years of baggage.”
“Liam—”
“Are you seriously going to tell me you had no idea? You left the very next day.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“So you didn’t.” His mouth pulls tight. “You just waited until I was gone.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then explain it to me.” Liam leans closer to the screen, his face filling it. “What’s going on, sis? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“You’re imagining the worst.”
“Because you’re not telling me anything.”
I turn another one of the knobs on the machine in front of me, though I have no idea what it controls. “The school was cutting my hours. You were moving to another city. It didn’t make sense for me to stay there alone anymore. Then this job came up, and it was too good to refuse.”
“What happened to Maria’s offer?”
“I couldn’t take it.”
“And what about art school?” His brows pull together. “We talked about you going back.”
My fingers tighten around the knob.
Even without Alex crashing back into my life, art school had never been realistic. One degree was expensive enough. Two people studying at the same time, with no steady income between us, belonged in a life we didn’t have.
“There was no way I could go back,” I say. “Not while you were starting college.”
“Don’t make this about money.” His voice sharpens. “I told you, I don’t need you supporting me anymore. My scholarship covers tuition. They arranged housing, and I get a stipend for expenses.”
If only he knew every one of those benefits came wrapped in barbed wire.
“And I found a job on campus,” he continues. “I can send you money if you need it?—”
“No.”
The word comes out hard enough to stop him.
“Liam, I don’t need your money. I’m making more than enough at this new job.” I force my grip to loosen. “I want you concentrating on school. I know you love baseball, but you need something to fall back on too.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” He rolls his eyes, but some of the tension leaves his mouth. “You’ve drilled it into me enough. I’ll send you a report card full of As. Happy?”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Fine. Now tell me about this magical new job.” His eyes narrow. “Where are you, and why aren’t you on video? Turn it on.”
My stomach knots.
“Where are you even living?” he asks.
“I thought you said you knew I was in Dallas.”
“I know you’re somewhere in Dallas.” He gestures impatiently at the screen. “Where in Dallas? Who are you working for?”
My thumb hovers over the video icon.
One tap, and he’ll see everything I’ve been trying to hide.
I tap the video icon and turn the camera on.
Liam whistles straight into the phone. His gaze shoots past me, taking in the marble counters and the gleaming kitchen behind me.
“That place looks fancy as fuck.”
“Language.”
He gives me a sheepish grin. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Not even a little.” He shifts closer to his camera, trying to see around me. “I was imagining you trapped in some sweatshop when Elena said the job came with housing. What kind of job gives you somewhere to live unless it’s a sweatshop?”
I roll my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You were the one refusing to turn on the camera.”
“It’s a live-in arrangement. Cooking, running the house. The pay is better than three jobs put together, and there’s no lunch rush.”
“Who, Em?”
“A private household.”
“You’re doing that thing where you answer a different question.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
He waits.
Eighteen years old, and he already knows silence works on me better than pushing ever could. But if I’m being honest, he learned this trick at seven from Danny.
“The investors,” I say at last. “The ones behind the town project. I work for them now.”
The pause that follows has weight.
When Liam speaks again, his voice has slowed, the way it does on the mound when the count is full and every pitch matters.
“I remember them.”
I’m almost afraid to ask, but I ask anyway. “Who?”
“The Hartleys.”
Liam—”
The memory reveal works best when Liam begins haltingly, then grows more certain as each detail returns. Belle’s fear should sit underneath every answer because she needs him to stop digging.
“No, listen. I’ve been chewing on this since the day you got hurt.” Liam’s gaze shifts away from the camera, his brow furrowing. “Something clicked when I saw that guy at the town hall. Alex. I remember him now.”
My fingers curl against the edge of the counter.
“He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he? From before.”
“Liam—”
“And Danny.” His eyes snap back to mine. “I used to play ball with him all the time. He took me to the batting cages. To practice. Alex would pick us up.”
The marble bites into my palm.
“I couldn’t place Danny at first,” he continues. “He came to so many of my games that I thought he was some kind of scout. I even told Diego, That scout’s back again. But when I saw him standing beside Alex, it all came flooding back.”
A breath travels across the line.
“We played catch. Me and Danny. Somewhere cold.” His words come slowly, as though he’s feeling his way through a dark room. “There was a barn, and the light inside buzzed whenever it rained.”
I find it difficult to breathe.
“And Alex was there.” Liam looks down at his hand, curling his fingers around an invisible baseball. “He put my middle finger along the top seam and my thumb underneath. Told me not to twist my wrist. Just let the ball roll off the edge.”
The uncertainty disappears from his voice.
“He taught me the curveball.” His eyes lift to mine. “The pitch that got me my scholarship. Didn’t he?”
The counter leaves a hard red line across my palm.
Panic spreads through me, slow and cold. How much does Liam remember? How much more is waiting beneath the surface?
I need him to stop.
“That’s a very old memory.”
“I know what I remember.” His expression tightens. “They look different now. Danny especially. I don’t remember him having all those scars.”
The word tears something open inside me.
Scars.
Danny paid because his brother chose me. Because Alex fell in love with me.
And Thomas paid the final price.
Guilt hooks beneath my ribs and pulls. I close my eyes, forgetting for one dangerous second that the camera is on.
“What’s wrong, Emma?”
My eyes fly open.
“Nothing, bug.” I force my hand away from the counter before he notices how tightly I’m gripping it. “It’s just strange hearing you talk about our old life.”
He goes quiet.
Liam’s silences have never been empty. He watches, assembles the pieces, and waits for me to give him the one I’m hiding.
“Is this a problem?” he asks at last. “Them knowing us? With us having different names now?”
Too perceptive. He has always been too perceptive.
“We knew them,” I say carefully. “A long time ago, before Pinehaven. They were old friends.”
“Old friends,” he repeats.
“The project brought them to town. They found out I was there, and things lined up.” I make myself shrug. “You know, I learned some of their mother’s recipes. They needed someone to handle the meals and help run the house.”
“And the names?”
“I don’t think it matters what we call ourselves now.”
His mouth presses into a line. He doesn’t believe me. Not completely.
I push before he can ask another question.
“How’s the conditioning?”
He studies me for another moment, letting me know he sees the sidestep even as he allows it.
“Brutal. Coach moved our lift to six in the morning.”
“That should be illegal.”
“There’s a taco truck beside the field house that fixes most problems. Not as good as Elena’s, but it’ll do.”
“Eat a vegetable that isn’t Pico.”
“Pico counts.”
“It absolutely does not.”
A small smile touches his mouth, but it fades too quickly.
“Em.”
The way he says it tightens my throat.
“You left our house, and I had to hear about it from Elena.” His voice is quiet now. No anger left to hide behind. “That’s all. I wanted you to know that I know.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
The screen goes dark before I can string together an answer that isn’t an apology or another lie.
I stand alone in the shining kitchen with the phone pressed against my chest. Most days, the empty house doesn’t bother me.
Alex leaves before dawn, true to his word, and rarely returns before dinner. Even then, he usually comes home late, claims he ate somewhere else, and shuts himself inside his study without so much as looking for me.
I used to think that was better.
Better than seeing him every day. Better than moving through the same rooms, breathing the same air, and knowing I couldn’t touch him. Couldn’t lean into him. Couldn’t ask him to hold me the way he once did without thinking.
But tonight, the silence presses against my skin.
For one weak impossible second, I want to be that girl in Montana again. The small-town girl who fell in love with a boy who looked at her as though she had hung the moon and scattered every star around it for him.
I miss him.
Not the man who watches me with suspicion and keeps every door between us locked. The boy he used to be. The way his presence once filled every empty space inside me.
Now he is only a few rooms away, and somehow that makes the loneliness worse.
Liam is in another city. Alex is close enough to hear if I call his name, but he isn’t mine anymore.
I have never felt so alone.
The ache of it builds behind my eyes, beneath my ribs, everywhere at once, until it feels as though my own thoughts are scraping me raw from the inside.
Somewhere in Austin, my brother is turning over the fragments of our old life. A ranch. Fireflies blinking through the dark. A buzzing barn light. Alex’s hands correcting a seven-year-old boy’s grip on a baseball.
For ten years, the past stayed where I buried it.
Then Alex came back carrying a shovel.
Now the ground is splitting beneath my feet, and I don’t know what else he’ll unearth, or whether I’ll fail to save everyone again.
Alex surprises me by coming home early.
He doesn’t disappear into his study or claim he already ate. Instead, he sits at the dining table and makes it clear that I’m expected to join him.