30. Kane
Friday, Seven PM
I stand outside Sloane’s door at seven o’clock with my hand raised to knock and my heart going too hard in my chest.
I knock, then lower my hand and wait.
Footsteps inside. The slide of a chain, the deadbolt clicking back, each sound arriving with the precision of a countdown. Then the door opens.
Sloane stands there. I wasn’t ready for how tired she looks.
Hair in a messy bun, no makeup. Jeans and a sweater, like she dressed for endurance rather than armor.
We look at each other across the threshold.
“Hi,” I say.
She doesn’t respond immediately. She looks at me, studying, assessing, taking her time with it. Then she steps aside — silent permission.
I walk past her into the apartment. Her perfume reaches me first — the same one she’s worn for years. Photos of us as kids on the shelves. The park visible through the window.
She gestures to the couch, and I sit.
She doesn’t sit beside me. She takes the chair across the room. There is careful neutrality in her expression, the look she uses when she’s holding a position.
The silence settles. I let it.
“I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t respond immediately. She looks at me with those gray eyes so like mine, studying me like she’s trying to recognize someone she thought she knew.
“You were right,” I continue. “I let you plan dinners for a man who was already taken. I let you believe you were doing something good for me when I knew. I should have told you the moment it started.”
She still doesn’t speak. Tears gather in her eyes but don’t fall yet.
“I’m sorry we lied to you for six weeks. I’m sorry we let you keep trying to set me up with Lisa while we were together, and I’m sorry I looked you in the eye at the gala and lied.”
A single tear escapes down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it away.
“I’m sorry for all of it. The lying. The sneaking. Making you feel like an idiot when you’re not. I am. We are.” My voice cracks on the last part. “I’m so fucking sorry, Sloane.”
Her hands shake. More tears now, streaming freely.
“But you’re not sorry for being with her.”
“No.” I meet her eyes and hold them. “I’m not sorry for falling in love with her. I’m sorry for how we handled it. I’m sorry we didn’t trust you enough to tell you the truth. But I’m not sorry for what we are.”
Sloane is quiet for a moment. Then: “Is this going to end like Sidney?”
“No.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can know that this is not the same. I was seventeen, Sloane. I wanted Sidney and I didn’t stop to think what it might cost you.
” I hold her gaze. “I understand now. But Vera is the person I’m choosing, every day, knowing exactly what it costs and choosing it anyway. That’s not what happened with Sidney.”
She looks at me for a long time.
“What if it still blows up?”
“Then we’ll have blown it up honestly. And whatever happens between Vera and me, you don’t lose her.
That’s not how this works. You lost Sidney because Sidney had to choose between you and what she felt for me, and she didn’t have the language for it.
Vera is not Sidney. She has been terrified of losing you since the start.
You are not the thing she’s willing to sacrifice.
” I hold her gaze while she takes that in.
“That is the one promise I can actually make.”
Sloane’s face crumples.
“You fight all the time,” she says through tears. “Every time you’re in the same room.” Her voice breaks. “The Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown. I thought you genuinely couldn’t stand each other.”
She looks away. “I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot. We didn’t know it ourselves.”
“Don’t do that,” she says, with sharpness in her tone. “Don’t make it sound inevitable. Like it was obvious and I missed it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.” Her jaw tightens. “It doesn’t make it easier.”
I let the silence hold.
The clock ticks. Traffic filters up from the street below.
“It was never hate,” I say. “I think it was always this. But neither of us knew how to handle what we felt, so we fought instead.”
I watch her face. The way she’s holding herself together by increments, jaw tight, hands wrapped around her cup, and I know that look — I’ve known it since she was twelve and trying not to cry in front of people. She always thinks it’s weakness. It never is.
Then, smaller than I’ve ever heard her: “Where do I fit?”
“What?”
She sets her cup down. Carefully. Like the small act of precision is the only thing keeping the rest of her in place.
“If you’re with Vera, what happens to us?” Her voice fractures on the last word, and then the dam breaks — full sobs, her voice coming apart at the seams. “I’m not just losing my best friend to my brother. I’m losing my brother to my best friend. Where do I go? Who do I have? What happens to me?”
I can’t stay across the room for this. I move to her and crouch in front of her chair until we’re eye level. Her face is wet, eyes red and swollen, and she looks exactly the way she looked at sixteen when everything felt unsurvivable and I was the one she called.
I was always the one she called.
“Look at me.”
She does.
“You’re my sister.” I keep my voice steady, because one of us has to be. “She’s my love. Both of those things are permanent. Neither one cancels the other out.”
“Kane—”
“Listen to me.” I take her hands. They’re cold and shaking in mine and I hold them tighter. “I’m not choosing. You don’t have to choose. There is no choice to make.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can. I am.” I wait until she’s looking at me again, really looking.
“Our monthly dinners? Still happen. Morning coffee? Still happens. Your birthday at that restaurant with the terrible service that you refuse to stop going to? Still happens.” I hold her gaze.
“Nothing about us changes except our family gets bigger.”
“You can’t know—“
“I know this.” My voice is steady, more certain than I’ve been about anything. “What Vera and I have isn’t temporary, Sloane. It isn’t something that burns out in three months and leaves us all standing in the wreckage. I’m in this completely. She is it for me.”
She stares at me, reading me the way she’s read me her whole life, checking for the tells she’s always been able to find.
She won’t find any. Because it’s the truth.
“No more lying.” Her voice is firm despite the tears still falling. “Ever. About anything. I don’t care how small or how complicated. No. More. Lies.”
“Never again. I promise.”
“If you hurt her—” Her eyes flash with protective fury.
“You’ll break my face. I know.”
A small pause. Then: “And if she hurts you, I’ll break hers.”
I blink. Of everything she could have said in this moment, that was not what I expected.
“You’re still my brother, you idiot.”
“I know.” My voice comes out rough. “Thank you for that.”
She makes a sound that is almost, not quite, a laugh.
I stand and pull her toward me, wrapping my arms around her. She resists for half a second, body stiff, still angry, still carrying all of it — then collapses against me completely, sobbing into my chest.
Her whole body shakes, fingers fisting in my shirt, her face pressed hard into my shoulder. She cries the way she hasn’t cried since Dad died, like a week of hurt and fear and anger has finally found somewhere to go.
I hold her tight, one hand cradling the back of her head the way I used to when we were kids and she had nightmares, my other arm around her back, keeping her steady. My own tears come hot and fast, soaking into her hair.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’ll never lie to you again. Never. I swear.”
She cries harder.
We stand there as the sunset fades outside her windows and the room dims around us. Just holding each other. Just siblings.
“I’m angry,” she cries into my chest, the words muffled and broken. “I’m so angry.”
“I know. You have every right to be.”
“I felt so stupid about Lisa. Like everyone must have been laughing at me.”
“No one was laughing. And you weren’t stupid.” I press my cheek to the top of her head. “We were the assholes.”
A tiny sound escapes her — could be a laugh, could be another sob. “Yeah. You were.”
Her sobs gradually quiet to hiccups, then to shaky breathing, then to almost calm, but neither of us lets go.
Finally she pulls back slightly and looks up at me, face blotchy, eyes swollen, tear-streaked.
“I need time,” she says. “To process. To figure out how this works.” A breath. “And Vera — that’s separate. In my own time. Don’t push me on that.”
“I won’t.”
She searches my face to check if I mean it. I hold still and let her.
“Okay,” she says finally.
The word costs her something. I can see it. She’s giving me a door back in and it isn’t easy and she’s doing it anyway, because she’s Sloane, because this is what she does with the people she loves even when they’ve hurt her.
“We okay?” I ask.
She’s quiet for a long moment.
“We’re getting there.”
Not we’re fine. Not I forgive you. But we’re getting there, and from Sloane right now that’s everything.
I stand to leave. She walks me to the door, which is more than I arrived expecting.
At the threshold she says my name. I turn back.
She’s standing with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at me the way she used to when we were kids and she wanted to say something but hadn’t found the words yet.
“I’ll try,” she says finally. “That’s all I’ve got right now.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
She holds my gaze for one more moment. Something passes between us — not forgiveness yet, but the shape of it. The direction.
Then she closes the door, and I stand in the hallway and let myself feel the full weight of what it means that she opened it at all.
Friday, eight twenty-three PM
I sit in my car for five minutes with my hands on the steering wheel, breathing.
Relief hits in waves. Not fixed — but okay.
The city moves around me the whole drive over, indifferent, and I let it.
Vera opens her door before I can knock, wearing the same clothes she wore this morning. She takes one look at my face and pulls me inside.
She’s left the kitchen light on. Everything else dark.
I tell her everything. She listens without interrupting, curled into the corner of her couch with her knees pulled to her chest. When I finish she’s quiet for a long moment.
Then she asks the question I knew was coming.
“When is she going to call me?”
I go still.
“Kane.” Her voice shifts, reading me. “What did she say about me?”
“She needs more time.”
“How much more time?”
“She didn’t say.”
Vera pulls back slightly. “So she forgave you but she’s not ready to talk to me.”
“She didn’t forgive me. She said she’d try. That’s not the same thing.” I hold her gaze. “She wasn’t ready to include you in that yet.”
Her face falls. Then her shoulders drop, and she goes still — the stillness of someone who already knew the answer before she asked.
“That’s fair,” she says.
“Vee—”
“No, it is.” She looks at her hands. “You’re her brother. That’s different. Whatever you did, you’re still her family. I’m—“ She stops.
“You’re important to her, Vee.” I say.
“I’m the best friend who lied to her face.”
I want to argue. I can’t.
“So what do I do?” she asks. “Just wait?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s quiet, and the city hums outside, indifferent to all of it. Neither of us moves.
Then she uncurls from the couch and crosses to me without saying anything, tucking herself against my side with her head on my shoulder and staying there.
I wrap my arm around her and press my lips to her hair.
Across the city, a light is on in Sloane’s apartment. I don’t know that. But I know my sister — she’s not sleeping. She’s at her desk with her colored pens and her careful systems, trying to organize something that won’t organize.
We did that.
Vera’s breathing slows. Mine doesn’t.