Chapter 6 Cal
CAL
She’s beautiful when she’s angry. It isn’t news, but up close it lands like a fresh discovery.
She comes at me with heat still clinging to her skin from rehearsal, damp curls stuck to the nape of her neck, tank clinging to the line of her ribs.
The studio’s perfume and salt have followed her into the suite, tangling with the low, cool breath of the air conditioner and the faint cedar on my sleeves.
The afternoon is bright behind me, the harbor throwing fractured light through the glass and across her shoulders.
“Give me that.” She snatches the toy from my fingers, skin brushing skin—electric, immediate—and shoves it into her open case. The zipper bites closed with more force than necessary. “You have no right—”
“To what?” I keep my tone level, drier than a warning and far more amused than apologetic. “Deliver your lost luggage?”
“To go through it.” Color blooms higher in her cheeks, fury braided tight with embarrassment until she glows. “What the hell, Cal? You just made yourself at home in my room? Rifled through my things? What is wrong with you?”
“I wasn’t going through your things.” Technically true, and technicalities are my favorite sins. “Something in your bag started vibrating. I opened it to turn it off.”
Her mouth opens, shuts, opens again. “You could have left it.”
“And let the battery die? Where’s the fun in that?”
“It has a USB charger.”
“Oh?” I let a laugh slip, soft and pleased. “Energy efficient.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“It’s not.” She throws her hands up, turns away, and back again, ponytail cutting the air like a metronome for her temper.
The movement strips another inch of composure from the room, and I track it without meaning to, exactly the way she hates.
“You still have no boundaries. You walk into my room, go through my stuff, help yourself to anything you want to know about my life—”
“Well,” I settle into the arm of the chair like I have all afternoon to be provoked, “I do own a third of this building. Technically.”
The sound she makes sits somewhere between a growl and a scream. It shouldn’t be charming. It is.
“Get out.”
I don’t move.
“Cal. Get. Out.”
“No.”
Her eyes narrow to slits. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” I fold my arms, let the quiet stretch. “We haven’t talked in six years, angel. Forgive me for wanting to catch up.”
“Catch up?” She laughs, sharp as broken glass. “Fine. I moved to California. Got a job. Built a life without four overprotective assholes breathing down my neck. The end. We’re caught up. Now leave.”
“Marketing for a magazine,” I say, ignoring the dismissal because I can. “What kind of magazine?”
Her jaw sets. “None of your business.”
“The kind that requires…” I tilt my head toward the case, toward the purple curve she tried to bury. “Hands-on research?”
“Stop.”
“I’m curious.” The truth of it warms my voice. “You used to blush at the word kiss. Now you’re traveling with an entire collection of—”
“I said stop.” The word cracks. “God, Cal. Do you ever just stop? Let things go? Let people have privacy. Secrets.”
Secrets. The word hits like a key turning in a familiar lock.
No, I don’t let things go. Not with her.
Not ever. Sixteen-year-old Parker hid her journal with a dollar-store padlock.
It took me thirty seconds and a paperclip to open it.
I read it on my back on the dock while the boards warmed my shoulders, and her swim practice whistle blew in the distance.
Ryan Matthews. The feeling of being invisible in her own house.
The way she wanted to be seen as more than Charlie’s little sister.
I read things I had no right to read and memorized all of it like a prayer.
It didn’t stop there. The romance paperbacks wedged under her mattress.
The browser history, she thought, she cleared.
Every boy who looked at her twice. I solved each one like a problem set.
Not with fists. With pressure. Ryan’s family transferred that summer.
Jason Park found a new obsession two towns over.
Ryan Matthews—the one Jace carried her away from on graduation night—suddenly discovered an out-of-state scholarship that didn’t exist until it did.
I couldn’t have her. Silas couldn’t have her. Jace couldn’t have her. So no one else would either.
When she left, I didn’t stop. I moved the surveillance to a safer distance, the kind that leaves no fingerprints.
I’m the fixer. The man in the systems. Dating apps bend if you know where the code lives.
Reservations get lost. Tires go flat. Wrong turns multiply like rabbits.
If someone wanted Parker Carter from three thousand miles away, they had to work for it. Prove themselves. None of them did.
I shouldn’t have done it. Probably. I won’t tell her. Definitely. I call it quality control because the truth is uglier, and it’s mine.
“You’re doing it now,” she says, pulling me back into the room. Her voice has cooled, not by much. “Watching. Analyzing. Like I’m something to solve.”
“Maybe you are.”
“I’m not.” She crosses her arms in a mirror of me, chin up, sweat gleaming along the curve of her throat. “I’m a person. A grown woman. I make my own choices, and I don’t need you or your brothers tracking my shadow.”
“Grown woman.” I let the words turn over on my tongue and take my time letting my gaze drift down and back up. Not crude. Thorough. “I noticed.”
Color deepens along her cheekbones. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re cataloging me.”
“Maybe I am.” I push off the chair and stand, and she doesn’t retreat. “You’ve changed, angel. Can’t fault a man for noticing.”
“Yes, I can.” The fight doesn’t leave her voice, but it softens at the edges into something more dangerous. “I can blame all of you. You and Silas and Jace and Charles. You never let me grow up. You never let me make my own mistakes. You hovered, intervened, treated me like glass.”
“We were protecting you.”
“I didn’t ask to be protected.” The words spill raw. “I wanted to be normal. Go to parties. Kiss a boy without one of you grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me home. But I couldn’t, because you all decided I needed supervision.”
“Because you were reckless.”
“I was seventeen.”
“Exactly.” I step closer. The AC hums, steady and indifferent. “Seventeen and hopping fences in a skirt, sneaking into houses where men twice your size watched you like a dare, drinking things you didn’t see poured. Someone had to watch you.”
“No one had to do anything.” Her hands curl at her sides, knuckles pale. “You chose it. And then you acted surprised when I left and didn’t look back.”
“You think we were surprised?” It comes out harder than I intended. “We knew you’d run. The second you could, you would. That’s why—”
I stop. The words are a cliff, and there’s no safe way down.
“That’s why what?” She’s so close now I can count the gold flecks in her brown eyes. Her shampoo is floral and clean under the salt and studio sweat, and it makes something in my chest go tight. “Say it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
We’re too close. If I reached out, I could put my fingers under her jaw and tilt her face up and end six years of pretending I didn’t want to. I step back instead because I still have a line, and I’m not crossing it first.
“The only reason I came back,” she says, voice thick with something I can’t yet name, “is for Charles and Sienna’s wedding. I’m here a week, then I’m gone. Back to my life. My job. My world that doesn’t include you or your brothers or anyone on this island.”
“Your world.” I taste the bitterness of it. “The one with a magazine that requires sex toys in your luggage.”
“Yes.” Her chin lifts. Defiant. “My world. Where I get to make choices and have experiences and be an adult instead of a child you all need to protect.”
“We never thought you were a child.”
“You treated me like one.”
“That’s not—” I scrub a hand through my hair. “That’s not why we did it.”
“Then why?” She opens her arms, a bare, exasperated offering. “Enlighten me. Why did you spend years making sure I couldn’t have a normal teenage life? Why follow me everywhere, scare off anyone who looked at me, treat me like I was your responsibility?”
Because you were never just Charlie’s sister to me. Because the idea of anyone else touching you made me want to break things. Because I’ve been in love with you since I was sixteen, and the only way to live with that truth was to salt the earth around you and pretend it was for your own good.
I don’t say any of it. The code stands where it always has—best friend’s sister, off-limits, forever.
“It’s not like we were friends,” she says when my silence stretches. The fight has gone low and steady in her voice, like a flame refusing to die. “You were Charlie’s friends who tolerated me because you had to. That’s all it ever was.”
There it is. The thing that sent Silas stalking down the hall last night like he needed to hit something.
I laugh. I don’t mean to. It comes out wrong—bitter at the edges, cracked through the middle. “So that’s what set him off. You actually believe that.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, angel.” I meet her eyes and hold them, let her see the part of the truth I can give. “We really didn’t.”
The words hang between us, heavy as the heat that followed her in.
She swallows, and for a second the room narrows to the point where her breath touches mine, and the harbor light cuts a bright line across her throat.
I’m two seconds from telling her everything I shouldn’t when a shadow shifts under the door, a footfall pauses, and the latch whisper-clicks like a trigger being pulled.