Ralph
Theo stood in the middle of the pool deck staring at the glass doors his sister had just vanished through.
"Shit." He ran both hands through his hair, pulling hard enough to ruin it. "I just found her. I just found her, and the first thing I did was chase her away."
I didn't respond. There wasn't a right thing to say. He was correct, and we both knew it, and pointing it out would've earned me a broken jaw.
He turned toward the exit. "Emma, wait!"
I moved with him. We pushed through the doors together, the afternoon sun hitting us after the cool humidity of the pool facility. The parking lot was half-empty. My SUV was where Emma had parked it this morning.
She was gone.
We scanned the lot, the sidewalk, the street beyond. Nothing.
Theo let out another curse, this one louder, aimed at the sky. Then he turned to me, and his eyes were a war between fury and fear, and the fury was winning by a hair.
"Start talking," he barked, poking a hard finger into my chest. "Before I dismantle your face."
"That's fair," I said, not shifting an inch. "Go ahead."
"It's not a joke, Ralph! My little sister has been residing under your roof, and apparently spending enough intimate time with you to show up here with you. You looked me in the eye in your kitchen and lied about a pink suitcase. Start. Talking."
I gave him the truth.
I started from the baseline—the night her name finally flashed on my phone after three years of static. Theo listened.
"Why wouldn't she just call me?" The anger went out of him, and what was left was rawer—his voice dropping to something I hadn't heard from him since we were kids. "I'm her brother, Ralph. I would have burned that city down for her."
"Because she was drowning in her own shame, man. She left to prove she could survive on her own terms, and she couldn't bear the thought of coming back with nothing. She thought she'd burned the bridge down, and she assumed you'd stopped waiting on the bank."
"I never stopped waiting," he hit back, his voice thick, the words clearly tearing something out of him. "Not for a single day."
"I know that. You know that. But she's been living in the dark for three years, man. Long enough that a little light starts to look like a trap."
Theo pressed both of his palms flat against the hot roof of his sedan, burying his face between his forearms.
I swallowed past the sudden tightness in my own throat, taking a step closer. "There's more."
He lifted his head, his eyes bloodshot.
"She has lupus."
Theo just stared at me. I watched it hit him in waves. Confusion. Comprehension. Then something that aged him five years in a second.
"How long?" he whispered.
"Five years. She was swimming through the initial flares during her final season. She didn't know what it was. That's why her career ended, Theo. It wasn't a mental block."
He turned away from me, took three blind steps toward the edge of the lot, stopped, and came right back.
"She went through an autoimmune diagnosis alone. While I was signing endorsements."
He pressed a closed fist hard against his mouth, his chest heaving. Theo was fighting tears in a parking lot.
"I should have been a brother, not a businessman sending formal texts she could easily ignore." His voice broke.
I stood there and let the silence cover him.
As I watched my best friend break apart over the sin of keeping secrets, my own secret was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I was doing the exact same thing to him.
Right now. Today. I was hiding a progressive neurological tumor from the person who handled my entire life, convinced I was protecting his peace, when in reality, I was just too proud and too terrified to let anyone see my walls closing in.
I was Theo. I was committing the exact crime he was currently loathing himself for. And I couldn't find the voice to confess it.
The drive back to the valley was silent. I sat in the passenger seat of his car, granting him the territory he needed, watching the blurred horizon of the city slide past the glass.
My eyes were doing the familiar, rhythmic reflex—checking my peripheral coordinates every three minutes to ensure the vision was holding.
It was still there. The episode from the clinic hadn't repeated itself, and the updated medication was buying me traction.
But it was already taking more of it to hold the same ground than it had a month ago.
At a long red light off the highway, Theo turned his head slowly and looked at me. It was a long, searching look, digging straight into twenty years of shared blood.
"Are you taking care of her, Ralph?"
"With everything I've got."
"Are you in love with my sister?"
The directness of it hit my lungs like a starter's pistol. Theo didn't deal in euphemism; he didn't circle a target. He went straight for the jugular of the thing everyone else was dancing around.
"Yes," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "I am."
He held my gaze for three long seconds while the dashboard clock ticked. The light shifted to green, and a truck behind us let out an impatient honk.
"Keep her safe, Ralph." He shifted the car into drive, his voice dropping low and final. "I mean it. If you break her, there isn't a place on this earth you can hide from me."
"I won't break her."
He dropped me off at the foot of my driveway and pulled away without another syllable. I watched his red taillights bleed into the midday haze before turning toward the house.
The moment I stepped inside, the atmosphere hit me. It wasn't the comfortable, living quiet of Emma tucked away in the guest room with a book. It was a different frequency. Empty.
"Emma?"
Nothing.
I walked down the corridor, my chest tightening with every step. The guest room door was wide open. The mattress was bare, the linen sheets folded into a tight, military-grade stack right in the center of the bed. The closet was open.
The pink suitcase was gone.
I pulled my phone out, my thumb shaking as I hit her contact. It rang four times before dropping into her voicemail. Her recorded voice, flat and neutral, asked me to leave a message at the tone.
I redialed immediately. Voicemail.
I stood in the center of the empty guest room, and the silence pressed in on me.
Suddenly, my vision hitched. The sharp corners of the doorframe went soft, the edges of the room bleeding into a milky, unfocused smear, the white sheets on the mattress turning into a bright, blinding cloud.
I blinked violently, my fingers gripping the wood molding so hard my knuckles popped, a cold sweat breaking along my neck.
I couldn't tell if the shadow was the tumor claiming territory or if it was just pure terror—and in that moment, it didn't matter, because either way, I couldn't see, she was gone, and I had let her walk out into the dark again.
I called Theo back. He answered before the first ring completed.
"She's gone," I growled into the receiver, my voice harsh with panic. "The room is cleared out. She's not answering my calls!"
A sharp, ragged breath came through the line. "Where would she go, Ralph?"
"I don't know. Maybe… The Broadway station," I said, the memory hitting me.
"Broadway? What the hell is at Broadway?"
"It's a long story."
"I'm already turning the car around. I'll sweep the Sunset motels. You take the grid down by Broadway."
I couldn't drive my own truck. Admitting my hands weren't steady enough to navigate the afternoon traffic cost me more than the cab fare, but I shoved myself into the backseat of a yellow taxi anyway, my fingers flying across the screen as I fired text after text into her dark phone.
Ralph
Emma, come back to the house.
Whatever we broke today, we'll fix it. Together.
Please don't do this. Don't vanish on me.
Nothing. Every single bubble delivered, but the read receipts remained stubbornly blank.
I was standing outside the Broadway station, when a flash of familiar movement caught my eye across the street. It wasn't Emma.
It was Nadia.
She was stepping out of the local broadcasting building, her sneakers squeaking on the concrete as her eyes remained glued to her phone. I recognized her from the afternoon I'd spent in the studio lobby while Emma recorded her voiceover work.
I cleared the street in four strides, my shadow falling over her screen. "Nadia."
Her head jerked up. Her eyes widened before narrowing into two slits of pure, protective hostility. It was impressive how fast she geared up for war. "What did you do to her?"
"I didn't do anything. Her brother intercepted us at the facility, things went sideways, and she bolted before anyone could stop her."
"Bolted where, Ralph?"
"That's exactly why I'm here. I need to know where she is, Nadia. Where is she?"
Nadia studied my face. The internal calculation played out across her features—absolute loyalty to Emma's privacy versus absolute concern for Emma's survival, two equal forces tearing her in opposite directions.
"She will literally skin me alive for this," Nadia muttered, rubbing her temples.
"She has to be present to skin you," I said, my voice dead serious. "Give me the address."
Nadia let out a long breath and gave me the name of a dingy motel off the highway and the room number. I was already turning toward the curb before she could even finish the digits.
"Hey!" her voice sliced through the traffic, pulling me back.
I turned around. Nadia was standing under the awning, her face incredibly solemn.
"Do not screw this up, Brandt. She has spent every single one of her second chances on men who treated her like a footnote. You better be worth the final one."
I scrambled into another cab, my fingers flying as I alerted Theo.
Ralph
Found her. Sunrise Motel, Room 14.
His response flashed back within three seconds.
Theo
Go. She won't let me within a mile of that door right now. She might actually listen to you. Fix it.