31. Silas
Chapter thirty-one
Silas
The day after is not peaceful exactly, only absent of drama, angst, and familial disapproval.
I finish my sandwich and go down to the warehouse.
Not because there is anything there that requires my attention, but because the warehouse is where I go when I don’t know where else to go—a habit I’ve had my entire life and am only now recognizing as a pattern rather than a preference.
The warehouse is known to me. The smell of it, the sound of it, the light through the tall windows in the afternoon, all of it known, and dare I say it—safe.
I walk the floor for a while.
It’s my day off, so I’m not supervising.
Not working. Just moving through the rows of pressing machines and the suspended rails and the sorting tables, watching the staff get ready for the afternoon trucks to deliver the bins of cleaned linens they picked up yesterday.
Hotels, conference centers, and restaurant contracts; these are most of the work that comes through the main warehouse.
Efficient. Continuous. Relationships. What my father built this business on.
The floor staff nod and go back to their work.
This is one of the things I’ve always appreciated about the warehouse—nobody here requires anything of me I’m not prepared to give. They need to do their work. I need to be somewhere where my feet know the layout. We’ve always had an understanding.
I stay until the afternoon crew leaves and then I go upstairs.
The enormous family apartment above the warehouse is more like the dining room, with everything in its correct place.
My father believes the arrangement of a space reflects the arrangement of a mind.
He has become more entrenched in that belief every year.
I don’t mention it to Logan, but I know Henry notices. Henry notices almost everything.
I sit at the kitchen table with a glass of water and think.
Or I try to think.
What I end up doing is thinking about Norah’s rowhouse. The warmth of her kitchen. I think about her Aunt Claire on the sidewalk. About what happened afterward.
It’s about her, but it’s also about who I become when I’m with her, stripped of the roles I’ve spent years playing in this family: the playboy, the middle son, the loose cannon who keeps everything carefully filed under ‘controlled.’
I lay in her bed and listened to her talk about breaking into a dean’s office at seventeen, and the tightness in my chest eased. I think about that for the rest of the afternoon until I hear Henry on the stairs.
He comes in without announcement, without ceremony, with his easy energy and unconcern for anything that affects the peace. He goes to the refrigerator, opens it, stands in front of it for a moment with the focused consideration of a man conducting a serious assessment.
“You eat today?” he asks, without turning around.
“Yeah. I had a sandwich.”
He glances back at me. He doesn’t believe me, but decides not to pursue it. He takes out a bottle of apple juice, leans against the counter, and studies me cautiously.
“Greer said you didn’t go out last night,” he says.
“No, I stayed in.”
Henry nods, the nod of someone gathering information without making anything of it. He takes a drink and looks out the window at the back lot where a truck is being loaded for the evening run.
“How’s the bookshop girl?” he says.
The phrasing arrives before I’ve prepared for it.
It isn’t hostile or pointed, but rather the affectionate casualness of a younger brother who has never once meant anything malicious in his life and has no idea of the repercussions of using a label instead of a name.
The bookshop girl. At least he didn’t say that human chick.
I look at him, realizing what Norah is in relation to the situation. The situation being temporary in the family’s understanding of it. A phase that will pass and leave nothing behind except maybe a story Henry tells at some future dinner table about the time Silas had a summer fling with a human.
“I guess she’s fine,” I say.
Henry nods again, easy, already moving on in his mind. “Probably for the best,” he says, half to himself, in the tone of someone thinking out loud rather than making an argument. “Things settling down on their own. Less complicated that way.”
He reads my comment wrong, but what he says is meant kindly.
That is the part that hits hardest.
He means it with the complete affectionate goodwill of a man who loves his brother and has concluded, without malice, without pressure, with the natural assumption of someone who knows how these things go in this family, that it is running its course.
That Silas will come back to himself, to the structure, to the life that has been built around him, because that’s what Silas always does.
They are all waiting me out.
Not cruelly. Not as a strategy. They’re doing it the same way you wait out the weather—with patience and the comfortable certainty that the sky will return to its clear, sunny state, because that’s what it always does.
Henry finishes his drink and throws the bottle in the recycle bin. He’s about to head back downstairs. I can see him gathering himself for it.
He stands there, looking at the floor, the way he looks at things he’s been sitting with for a while and finally decides to speak.
I wait.
“I think about Mom sometimes,” he says. “I was too little to really know her. But I remember…” He stops. “I remember she laughed differently when Dad wasn’t home.”
I look at him.
He looks back, and what’s in his face is not grief exactly. More complicated than grief. The look of a man who has been carrying this his whole life and has never found the right moment to say it out loud.
“Yeah,” I say. “She did.”
I haven’t said that to anyone. Logan was old enough to notice and has spent his life avoiding subjects that would complicate his relationship with our father.
Greer probably knows and has kept it where he keeps everything that isn’t his to name.
My father built twenty-five years of grief around a version of his wife that was real but incomplete.
I will never tell him. Some truths cannot be unsaid, and this one would serve no one still living.
Henry was four when she died. He remembers her in pieces: the sound of her laugh, the smell of her perfume. He doesn’t have a full picture. Just the joy, and that it was different when our father wasn’t home—the instinct of a man who feels things more clearly than he lets on.
He nods slowly. We don’t need language for what passes between us—the shorthand of brothers who grew up in the same house and learned, separately and together, to read the things that were never said in it.
Then he straightens. Pushes off the counter. And I brace for the easy exit, the deflection, the grin that closes the door on anything too real.
He doesn’t grin.
He looks at me. “You’re leaving,” he says.
I meet his eyes. “Yeah,” I say.
He exhales. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. He looks at the table, then back at me, and his expression does what it rarely does. It opens.
“I won’t say anything,” he says. “To Dad or Logan.” A pause. “Not that they won’t figure it out.”
“They will,” I say.
“Okay.” He crosses the kitchen toward me, and I don’t move, and he stops a foot away and looks at me the way he looked at me at the lake—warm and direct and without agenda.
“For what it’s worth, I like her. A lot.” He pauses, choosing the exact weight of the words. “I liked her in the parking lot. I liked her at trivia. I liked that she didn’t let Matt push her around on the loading dock.”
The corner of his mouth lifts into a small, genuine smile. “I hope you and Norah are happy, Silas. I genuinely do.”
My chest opens up. I wasn’t expecting that.
He opens his arms.
I close the distance, and we hold on—briefly, in the way brothers hold on, the embrace carrying everything the conversation didn’t.
He lets go first and steps back.
His grin returns, slightly worn at the edges. “Go,” he says. “Before I say something embarrassing.”
I go.
I grab my backpack from my closet and pack emergency cash, extra clothes, and my wallet.
On my way out, I take a small framed picture from the hall table.
Mom is seesawing with me when I was probably four.
Her head is thrown back in laughter, and my mouth is a big O of delight.
That’s how I remember her. That’s how I remember myself with her.
I go downstairs.
The warehouse floor is about to close. The machines are cycling down and the crew is moving more slowly as the clock runs out. Someone calls across the floor while a rack of garments moves along the overhead rail.
Everything is designed to keep running whether I’m here or not.
I walk out the door. Across the gravel. Into the truck.
I sit for a moment as the amber floodlights click on, bathing the parking lot in a warm glow. I think about Norah, how she’s going to open the door and find me on the other side of it.
I put the truck in gear. I already know what I’m going to say to her.
I’ve known for weeks.
I’m done calling it anything else.