5. The Good Brother
The Good Brother
The first thing Noah heard was his sister’s laugh cutting through the student union like it owned the room.
He looked up from the line of bad campus coffee and saw Sloane Mercer shrugging out of a camel coat by the windows, cheeks pink from the cold, dark hair tucked into a low knot that had already half-fallen apart in the snow.
She had one hand wrapped around her phone, the other lifting in a sharp wave when she spotted him, and for one clean second the pressure sitting under his ribs all morning loosened.
Then she narrowed her eyes at him from thirty feet away.
That should have warned him.
“No,” was the first thing she said when he got close enough to hug her.
Noah bent anyway and let her squeeze him hard. She smelled like cold air, expensive shampoo, and the vanilla lip balm she’d used since high school. “Great to see you too, Sloan.”
She leaned back and gave him a slow once-over. “Absolutely not.”
He hooked her bag strap off her shoulder before she could protest and kissed the top of her head. “You want to try a complete sentence or are we doing ominous fragments all afternoon?”
“I’m doing sibling triage.” She kept studying his face with the unnerving focus of someone who had known him before he got good at being easy. “You look like a man being polite at his own funeral.”
He snorted. “Dramatic.”
“And you look tired.”
“I had practice.”
“You always have practice.”
That was true enough that he didn’t bother arguing. He took her overnight bag and gestured toward the coffee line. “You want something?”
“I want the truth,” she said.
He looked at her.
Sloane smiled brightly at the barista walking past and lowered her voice. “But sure. Also tea.”
Of course she did. She liked making a point and then pretending she hadn’t.
It was, among other things, one of the reasons Ethan Callahan had been stupid enough to fall in love with her and disciplined enough to survive it long-distance.
Noah had spent the last six months adjusting to the deeply weird reality of his younger sister being settled in a way that looked less like romantic chaos and more like actual happiness.
Ethan was across the country most weeks now, building a job that kept him away more than either of them wanted, but Sloane wore the distance like something chosen, not suffered. Steady. Sure. Irritatingly evolved.
Noah ordered a coffee for himself and tea for her, and they found a table by the windows where students in damp coats tracked slush over old tile.
Outside, snow feathered down over Halcyon’s brick walkways and turned the campus lawns into flat white silence.
Inside, the union smelled like fryer oil, wet wool, and roasted beans left on heat too long.
Sloane wrapped both hands around her paper cup without drinking. “So.”
“So.”
She tipped her head. “You called me back in under four minutes last night.”
“That’s what good brothers do.”
“That’s what guilty brothers do.”
Noah took a swallow of coffee and regretted it immediately. Burnt. Bitter. Too hot. “I am literally here. In daylight. Buying you tea. What part of this says guilty?”
“The part where you’re performing ‘fine’ at me with your jaw locked.”
He set the cup down.
There it was already, the old impossible thing about being with Sloane: he could fool a locker room, a coach, a local reporter asking polished questions under fluorescent lights.
He could fool himself on a decent day. But his sister had spent most of their childhood sitting across from him at kitchen tables after arguments that never got named, watching him smooth over the weather in the house until everybody could breathe again.
She knew the difference between calm and management like it had been her first language.
“You drove up to insult me?” he asked.
“I took the afternoon train to see my brother because I missed him,” she said. “The insults are complimentary.”
He smiled despite himself.
Her expression softened a notch. “Hi.”
That landed deeper.
“Hi,” he said.
She reached across the table and tapped his taped left thumb where it rested against the cardboard sleeve around his coffee. “Too tight.”
“It’s fine.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Ethan teaching you sports medicine from a distance now?”
“Please. Ethan would tell me to hydrate and mind my business.” She sat back. “I’m choosing not to do one of those things.”
Noah huffed a laugh and looked out the window.
A pair of first-years in Wolves hoodies slid on a patch of slush and pinwheeled into each other.
Somewhere behind them, a milk steamer screamed.
His body felt like practice still lived in it—adductors sore from edge work, shoulder heavy, the dull pulse in his thumb where the tape bit into skin.
This morning on the ice, the rink air had sliced cold into his lungs while Coach ran transition drills hard enough to wring the chatter out of the room.
Noah had skated first line on every rep, barked at Dylan to move his feet through contact, clapped Cole on the shoulder after a clean breakout, and acted like the pressure around the program was just another thing conditioning could burn off.
The public version of him was having a very strong week.
Sloane watched him over the rim of her cup. “Mom says you sound great on the phone.”
“Mom says that when I say hello.”
“She also says you keep changing the subject every time she asks how you are.”
“I’m busy.”
“Noah.”
Something in her tone made him drag his gaze back.
She wasn’t smiling now. Just looking at him with that direct, familial steadiness that had gotten sharper with age instead of softer.
“What happened?” she asked.
He could have gone broad there. School. Hockey.
The administrative mess trailing the team like a storm cloud.
He could have said nothing had happened exactly, just the accumulation of too many people waiting for him to make the room feel less scared.
He could definitely not mention the seminar room, Talia’s voice tightening behind a closed door, or the way one woman had looked straight through his reflexes and called them habits.
So naturally his mouth said, “Why do you assume something happened?”
Sloane’s brows went up. “Because I was raised in the same house you were.”
That shut him up.
She folded one leg under her chair. “You get extra polite when you’re stretched too thin. You start sounding like customer service with people you love. You volunteer for things nobody asked you to fix. And then you act confused when everyone lets you.”
“I’m sorry my terrible flaw is being helpful.”
“My terrible flaw,” she echoed, deadpan. “Amazing. Inspiring. Put it on a mug.”
He laughed, low and unwilling.
Sloane waited him out exactly the way Talia had the night before, and the fact that he noticed the similarity at all made irritation prick under his skin.
He rubbed his thumb over the seam of the cup. “The team’s under a microscope. The younger guys are jumpy. Coach wants the room locked down until the board decides what it’s doing. Media’s been sniffing around because apparently ‘eligibility review’ makes excellent copy in this town. Happy?”
“Not remotely.” She blew on her tea. “That’s logistics. I asked about you.”
“I am part of the logistics.”
“There.” She pointed at him with her cup. “That. That’s what I mean.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You always this fun with Ethan when he’s stressed?”
“Oh, much worse. But Ethan occasionally admits to being a person, so my work there is easier.”
The line landed with enough accuracy that he looked at her sharply.
Sloane’s mouth tightened. “I’m not trying to pick a fight.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m trying to tell you that looking reliable is not the same thing as being honest.”
The student union kept moving around them—chairs scraping, someone dropping a fork, two girls in puffer jackets arguing over a charger—but for Noah the sentence came in hard and clean, as if the whole room had tilted to deliver it.
Useful was his way of avoiding honesty.
Favorites too.
Looking reliable is not the same thing as being honest.
His sister watched the hit register and exhaled slowly. “Okay,” she said. “That landed.”
He looked down at the table. “You all have a group chat, or—”
“No one had to tell me anything.” Her voice gentled, not enough to feel like pity. “I know you.”
He nodded once, because there wasn’t much else to do with that.
For a minute neither of them spoke. Noah watched the steam thin over his coffee.
He thought of the younger guys in study hall going silent the second consequences came up.
Thought of Coach telling him to keep rumor from becoming panic.
Thought of Talia reading his own sentence back to him and asking, without asking, how long he planned to keep letting beloved people hide inside a broken system because it felt kinder in the moment.
Sloane reached for a sugar packet and rolled it flat under one finger. “Do you remember sophomore year,” she said, “when Dad forgot to pick me up from debate?”
Noah blinked. “That’s random.”
“Do you remember?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “I came and got you.”
“After waiting forty minutes before calling him because you didn’t want to make him feel bad.”
He looked at her. “You were fourteen.”
“And freezing.” She gave him a thin smile. “You sat there on that awful folding-chair lobby bench pretending it was no big deal while I got angrier and angrier, and then the whole drive home you made excuses for him.”
Noah could still see flashes of it if he let himself: the fluorescent wash of the school lobby, Sloane in a blazer with her debate binder hugged to her chest, the sleet needling the windshield while he drove too carefully because the roads were slick and because he’d been furious in a way he didn’t know how to use.
“He’d had a bad day,” Noah said automatically.
Sloane just looked at him.
And there it was too—the old engine. Explain. Soften. Protect the landing.
He blew out a breath. “Okay. Fine. Point made.”
“Is it?”