3. Sloane
THREE
SLOANE
YEARS AGO…
A pest infestation forced the university to shut down the dorms for spring break, and the order left no room to argue. The administration blasted out an urgent email, and within days the residence halls turned into ghost towns.
I could go back to my parents' sprawling estate and spend a week watching my mother fade into the far wings of the house. While my father filled every room he entered with a suffocating silence built to make you feel like nothing.
Just the thought of it made my stomach pitch.
Violet sat on the edge of her mattress, watching me shove clothes into my bag.
"You could always crash with me," she said, tossing a pillow aside. "Fair warning, my parents aren't winning any awards. My mom especially. But the house is big enough, so you could dodge them easily."
I weighed my dismal options and let out a long sigh. "Okay."
The drive felt endless, but we talked the whole way.
By the time Violet threw the car into park in her driveway, my nerves had settled more than they had in months.
The property was a historic build with a wraparound porch and ancient trees crowding the windows.
It wasn’t as large as the mansion I'd grown up in.
But it felt warm and personal—a home someone had chosen to live in instead of a trophy they'd acquired.
Violet pushed the front door open and waved me in.
In the living room, a man took up a leather armchair near the window with a newspaper draped across his lap. His once-handsome features had long since hardened into a severe mask.
Violet crossed the floor toward him. "Hey, Dad."
He lowered the paper and hummed. "Violet. How was the drive down?"
"Good." She took a half-step back and gestured at me. "This is my roommate, Sloane. The dorms are closed for spring break and she couldn't fly home. So, I invited her to stay."
He looked at me and offered a tight smile. "You're welcome here, of course. Though Violet could've given us the courtesy of a warning before bringing a guest."
My pulse quickened. His voice was calm but the sharp reprimand braided into the gracious welcome was extremely familiar. I'd grown up surviving a similar brand of warfare.
"I texted Mom," Violet reasoned.
Right on cue, a woman appeared in the kitchen archway. She was petite and fair-skinned, with bouncing strawberry-blonde hair and a light step, crossing the room with her arms already stretched wide.
"You must be Sloane!" She practically sang it, yanking me into a crushing hug before I could brace my feet.
Her grip ran warm. "Welcome to our home.
Please, treat the place as your own." She pulled back and gripped my shoulders to flash a blinding smile.
"I'm Samara. Use my first name. Mrs. Paige makes me feel ancient. "
The defensive tension in my shoulders eased a fraction.
Then Samara let me go and turned to Violet. Her slow gaze crawled over her daughter, taking her in head to toe like a disappointed judge and snagging at her hips like she was tallying a flaw.
"Doesn't it crush your self-esteem," Samara mused, "having to stand next to a girl like her every single day?"
The living room flatlined.
My first thought was that I'd misheard her. My second was the sick realization that I hadn't.
Violet's face stayed level, and that was the detail that broke my heart. It wasn't the venom in the words, but how she absorbed the strike without a flinch. Her jaw stayed loose, her eyes fixed dead ahead, and her features locked into a practiced neutrality that cost her nothing.
"What do you mean by that?" Violet asked, her tone smooth.
"Just look at her." Samara gestured at me with a detached appreciation, like she was critiquing a sculpture. "She's so wonderfully slim. She fits the standard." She paused and tilted her head. "I honestly thought by now you'd have done something drastic about your weight, sweetheart. I really did."
My eyes cut to Violet.
Violet wasn't fat. She was nowhere near it.
She was lush and full-curved, with a magnetic body that bent the gravity of a room, a sharply cinched waist and hips that moved with their own authority.
She was gorgeous, and I'd never given her body a second thought until that moment, when her mother turned it into a weapon.
I opened my mouth, a retort burning on my tongue.
Violet's hand shot out, found mine without looking, and gave my fingers one fierce squeeze.
"I'm going to show Sloane up to the guest room," Violet told her parents, already turning her back and heading for the staircase.
We climbed the steps in a thick silence. Violet shoved a bedroom door open, ushered me in, and twisted the deadbolt behind us.
"Don't give it a second thought," she muttered, dropping her duffel on the rug.
I sank onto the edge of the quilted mattress and watched my best friend hang up her denim jacket and straighten the items on the dresser, her hands in constant motion. She paced the room without stopping for a breath.
"Violet," I started.
"It's fine. She's been dropping lines like that since middle school." Violet spun around, her mouth pulling into a hard line before it trembled and gave. "You just get used to the sting."
I almost argued that getting used to abuse didn't make it okay, but Violet met my gaze with a worn-out look that stopped me cold, and she turned back to her jacket.
So instead of lecturing her, I started talking about my own parents.
I laid out the truth about my father, a man who could drain the oxygen from a room by shifting his stance.
I told her about my mother's talent for being physically present and out of reach.
I spelled out what it felt like to survive in a house where love came strictly on the condition of obedience.
"What happens if you don't earn it?" Violet asked from her spot on the floor.
"You learn to stop needing it." I picked at a loose thread in the quilt. "Or you get good at faking whatever gets you through dinner."
She didn't reach for a silver lining or promise me it would get better. She just sat there and took in every gritty detail, nodding now and then, because she'd grown up under the same rules and didn't need a word of it explained.
Our friendship fused into something unbreakable that afternoon.
Hours later, Samara called up the stairs, her voice bright and singsong, as if the things she'd said to Violet had never happened at all. Downstairs, the long dining table was set for five. I counted the plates.
"Who's the fifth setting for?" I asked.
"My other child," Samara tossed over her shoulder, already bustling back into the kitchen. "Xavier. He should be pulling in any minute."
I snapped my head toward Violet. She'd never once mentioned a brother. I raised an eyebrow, and Violet just shrugged.
We took our seats. The food started coming around, and I reached for my fork on reflex.
"Hold on. We wait for Xavier," Samara snapped.
As if the tension summoned him, the front door clicked open and a man stepped into the foyer.
He wore wrinkled blue surgical scrubs and wire-rimmed glasses shoved high up his nose, his whole posture carrying the bone-deep exhaustion of a brutal shift.
His dark hair stood on end where a surgical cap had flattened it.
He froze in the archway for a second, and the moment I looked at him, the only thought my brain could supply was that he was devastatingly beautiful.
He and Violet shared an undeniable bone structure in their faces, a resemblance strangers could spot as shared DNA in a heartbeat.
But the resemblance died at the surface.
Where Violet was an open book, Xavier was guarded and still.
His dark eyes scanned every face at the table like a security sweep before landing on the empty chair.
Samara leapt from her seat.
"Xavier!" She rushed him and threw her arms around his neck.
All the warmth she'd withheld from Violet, all the fake pleasantry she'd performed for me, poured out of her now in a genuine rush.
His father stood, clapped a hand onto the younger man's shoulder, and the entire room rearranged itself around him.
Violet stayed glued to her chair. I sat frozen right beside her.
Then Xavier's gaze drifted across the table and caught on mine.
He locked his eyes on me, and I stared back, blind to everything else. A charge crackled through that suspended moment, a terrifying pull I had no name for and couldn't break.
I found him alone on the back porch after dinner, sleeves shoved up, nursing a glass of water like it was something stronger.
"Rough shift?" I asked, leaning against the railing beside him.
"Sixteen hours." He didn't look over. "You're the roommate who wasn't supposed to be here."
"And you're the brother who never got mentioned." I let that sit. "Guess we're both the family secret."
That earned me a glance, and the corner of his mouth tipped up, the first crack in all that armor. We stayed out there long after the porch light pulled in moths, trading easy talk that should've felt awkward with someone I'd just met and somehow didn't.
After that night, we found a way to talk every single day.
It started over trivial things: trading book recommendations, debating movies, a heated argument over whether some pretentious indie film was worth the runtime that turned into a plan to watch it together.
The casual banter mutated into deeper talk.
We confessed what empires we were trying to build, what failures kept us up at night, the toxic family dynamics we were both clawing to escape.
He asked me probing questions and sat in the silence to wait for my answers.
I handed him secrets I'd never said out loud to another living soul.
I told Violet first. I sat cross-legged on my dorm bed and admitted I was falling hard for her brother, and I promised that if it went south, I'd never let it detonate our friendship. Violet just smirked. "I honestly think you two would be lethal together." That was the end of the debate.