Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
CALEB
The tension at breakfast is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Z slouches in one of Mom’s antique chairs like it personally offends him, glowering at the wall like he’s trying to set it on fire with his mind. His bruises are still deep purple, and he still moves like a dog that’s ready to bite.
The whole scene might be darkly funny if it weren’t so unnerving—him in a hoodie two sizes too big and a permanent snarl, sitting at a table set with cloth napkins and crystal juice glasses because Mom believes in using the good china every day.
“You run a business, and I’m good with side jobs, old man,” Z says to Silas before anyone’s even touched their food.
Helen cooked bacon, eggs, and French toast. Z opted for cereal.
His voice is casual and insolent as he adds, “Of course, I know you used to hustle for MCs. Think you could hook me up with your old contacts?”
Across the table, Harper sucks in a sharp breath, and then, under the tablecloth, I hear the unmistakable sound of her foot making contact with his shin.
Guess that wasn’t part of the script.
The shift in Silas is instant. One moment, he’s my affable stepdad—the guy who taught me how to rebuild an engine and insists on fondly calling me son. The next, he’s… someone with dead eyes and a face that hardens with muscle memory.
A vein bulges at his temple.
Beside him, Mom reaches out without looking, curling her fingers over his.
It’s a move I’ve seen a hundred times before.
To anyone else, it probably looks romantic.
To me, it looks like an anchor. Like she’s trying to keep him from slipping back into another version of himself.
She’s barely touched her eggs, but then, neither has Silas.
He’s been too busy glaring at Z since we sat down.
“You stay away from that crowd, or you’re out on your ass,” Silas growls. The words sound like they’ve been dragged over a cheese grater on the way out of his throat. “I won’t have my daughter around that kind of trash.”
The room goes silent. Even the grandfather clock down the hall seems to take a beat.
Z doesn’t flinch. Just picks up his spoon and takes another obnoxiously loud slurp of cereal out of Mom’s beautiful bowl. He licks a drip of milk off his lip and then—looking directly at Silas—he goes in for the kill.
“You mean the kind of trash you used to be? The kind Harper had to grow up with while you were busy playing don’t-drop-the-soap behind bars?”
Jesus.
My hand clenches around my fork. Every instinct I have is telling me to lunge across the table and shut him up. I force myself to loosen my grip.
One finger at a time. Pinky. Ring. Middle. Index.
Meanwhile, another part of me—the one I don’t like to acknowledge—isn’t mad because he’s wrong. It’s mad because he’s right.
Because Harper flinches when doors slam. She hoards snacks in her dresser. She didn’t know how to ride a bike. I’ve been watching her gather these pieces of a normal life ever since she got here, like someone who’s expecting them to be ripped away at any second.
And Silas? Sure, he’s different now.
But that doesn’t erase who he was when she needed him most.
“So maybe,” Harper says suddenly, cutting through the tension with a voice so even it almost sounds pleasant, “maybe Z could get a job that keeps him out of trouble.”
She’s smiling, but it’s not real. It’s the kind of smile you use when you’re holding a knife behind your back. She’s playing Silas. Strategizing. Running this breakfast table like it’s a poker game and she’s bluffing.
I watch her work. Watch the way Silas processes it—how his eyes flick to Z, then back to Harper, doing the emotional math. Keep Z close, keep Harper compliant. Minimize chaos. Maintain control. It’s disturbing how efficient he is.
Watching him play Harper playing him.
“Maybe he could work at your club,” I hear myself interject, looking back and forth between Mom and Silas.
It comes out too fast, like my brain skipped the part where I’m supposed to think through consequences. All I know is that we need a pressure valve in this house. And putting Z in a structured job near parental figures is the most elegant solution.
But Mom chokes on her orange juice. Her napkin flutters up to her face like a white flag. When her eyes meet mine, they’re wide. Not in a panicked way, not exactly. Just… like I’ve said something that activated a landmine buried under the hardwood floor.
“The club is for adults, honey,” she says, forcing a laugh that lands about ten degrees south of convincing.
I frown, confused by her reaction.
“He wouldn’t have to go inside.” I’m already mapping this out in my head like a calculus problem. “He could park cars. Valet. That’s all outside, right? Easy. He never needs to see the inside of the club or be around alcohol. And he could stay busy and make money.”
It’s a good plan. Elegant. Clean. It gets him out of the house. And conveniently away from Harper for more than five minutes at a time.
Z grins. Too wide. “Hell yeah. I’ll drive rich people’s cars around. Might even jack one for fun.”
Silas doesn’t laugh. Neither does Mom. They exchange a look I can’t decode. There’s something else going on. Something about the club they’re not saying.
But it’s Mom who recovers first, giving Z a smile that’s all polished charm. “Do you have a license?”
“Since I was fifteen.” He shrugs. “Hardship license. My old man lost his from a DUI.”
Of course.
Silas exhales like he’s been holding his breath since the dawn of time. “We’ll think about it.”
Which, in Silas-speak, means this conversation is over.
“Now finish your breakfast. You’ll be late.”
Z puts a hand dramatically over his heart, looking at Harper. “Not late for school! The horror.”
Harper snickers. Just a quick little sound, barely a breath. It’s private. A joke I’m not part of.
And for the first time since she moved in, I feel like a stranger in my own kitchen.
The drive to school is quiet.
Not peaceful quiet—tense quiet. The kind that hums with everything we’re not saying.
We aren’t picking up Marie today because she had an early morning dentist appointment. So it’s just Harper and me.
Harper stares out the window at the manicured hedges and perfectly trimmed lawns of our neighborhood. But I can tell she’s not seeing any of it. She’s somewhere else. Somewhere I don’t get to go.
Ever since Z walked through our door, something’s shifted. The whole dynamic—Harper, me, the house. All of it. It’s like someone rearranged the furniture in the dark, and now I keep stubbing my toe on things I thought I understood.
And it’s not just jealousy.
Okay. Maybe it is.
But there’s also this sick, sinking feeling that I’m losing something I never had the right to want in the first place.
Mom’s always talking about healthy communication. About how assumptions destroy relationships.
So I try. I try to be better. To sound casual, even though I’m slowly imploding from the inside out.
“How are you feeling now that Z’s here?”
Harper jumps, like I startled her awake. Or like she forgot I was in the car.
“Oh.” Her voice is rough. She glances at me—just for a second—and then looks away so fast it feels like a door slammed shut.
And my chest goes cold.
Because something’s off. Did something happen?
What happened?
She was downstairs with him for over an hour last night.
I tried not to think about it. Tried to focus on calculus homework at the kitchen table at two in the morning for the thinnest of excuses to be nearby, like that equation was more important than the sound of Harper’s laugh bleeding through the floorboards.
But now? The way she won’t meet my eyes, the way she curls inward like she’s hiding something—
I can’t not spiral about it.
“It’s fine,” she says flatly. “I’m… fine. You know.”
I don’t know! That’s the entire problem.
“No, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.” I pause, then add, “You two are clearly… close.”
The word feels wrong in my mouth. Close. Like I didn’t spend the entire breakfast watching their unspoken language and wondering if I was the only one who didn’t understand it.
“Yeah.” She still won’t look at me. “He’s like my only family.”
Family.
It should make me feel better and kill my doubts.
But the way she says it—soft and sad and final—makes me feel like I just got kicked out of a room I thought I had the key to.
Because technically, I’m family too. Her stepbrother. But that hasn’t stopped us from… everything we’ve done.
And suddenly I can’t breathe around the question rising in my throat.
I don’t want to ask it. I know I shouldn’t. I know how it’ll make me sound. Jealous. Controlling. Insecure.
It pops out anyway: “Have you ever slept with him?”
The second the words are out and hanging in the air, I want to drag them back down and swallow them whole.
Silence follows.
Nothing but the low hum of the Mustang’s engine and the pounding of my heart, loud and stupid in my ears.
I feel Harper stiffen beside me, even with my eyes glued to the road. I can’t help but glance over at her. She’s turned to face me, arms folded across her chest like armor, and when she speaks, her voice is deadly cold.
“Are you seriously gonna be like this right now?”
The smart move would be to apologize. De-escalate. Pretend it was a slip of the tongue.
But since I’m halfway to hell already, like the idiot I am, I double down instead.
“Have you?”
“Stop the car.”
I blink. “What?”
“Stop the car.”
There’s steel in her voice—pure command. I brake without thinking, the tires hissing on the pavement as we glide to a stop in the middle of the empty street.
She throws open the door and plants one foot on the asphalt.
“Harper, wait—I’m sorry—”
My hands are shaking on the wheel. I grip tighter.
Count to four. Get yourself together. One. Two. Three. Four.
Can’t. Can’t breathe right.
Check the mirrors—
What the fuck are you doing? She’s getting out. She’s leaving.