Her eyes narrow and, for a second, I think she’s going to laugh in my face again. But she doesn’t. “Is this the smaller falloutyou had in mind?” Her arms tighten across her chest, like she’s holding herself together by force.
“No.” I drag a hand through my hair, my fingers catching in the back where it’s still damp from the shower. “It wasn’t smaller. It was cruel. I know that now. I knew it the second I saw your face.”
“Well, maybe next time, realize it sooner.” Her jaw works, but she doesn’t speak right away. Then: “You made me feel disposable.”
The shame hits harder than her anger. “You aren’t. You never were.” I step forward without thinking, then stop myself halfway across the worn kitchen rug. “If I could take that night back—”
Her chin lifts. “Would you?”
The question catches me off guard. “What?”
“If you could undo it. Pretend it never happened.” She says it like she’s daring me to tell the truth, even if the truth splits her in two.
“No.” The answer is out before I can think better of it. “Not a chance. I’d take back what I said after. I’d take back the look on your face. But not you.”
Something flickers in her expression again—soft, then gone. She shifts her weight and looks toward the counter, her hands fidgeting with the edge of the towel she left there. “You can’t fix it with a few sentences.”
“Paige, I’m just asking for a chance to correct a mistake I made in telling you that it was a mistake. I’m not asking you to do anything with that. You can keep hating me. You can tell me to stay the hell out of your shop unless something’s broken. You can tell me we’re just neighboring businesses and that’s it.” My hands flex on the counter. “But I need you to know that I didn’t mean what I said that night.”
“And what about Jason?”
I hesitate. I have two choices now. I can lie, and she’ll go back to thinking she was a mistake. Or I can tell her the truth—spill my guts right now.
“I see,” she says and turns away.
“No. No, Paige, you don’t,” I say quietly. “Jason is… the only family I have.”
Chapter Seventeen
Paige
Jason is… the only family I have.
The words hang in the warm, sweet-smelling kitchen, cold and ugly. He says them quietly, like he’s afraid of scaring me off if he speaks too loudly.
There’s something raw about it—no swagger, no deflection—just truth laid bare on my mom’s butcher-block counter between the lemon halves and the bowl of dough.
I set my spoon carefully at the edge of the bowl because my hands want to shake. “What about your parents?” I ask.
I know some of it. I don’t know anything about his mom, and I have never met his dad. And I know he spent a lot of time at my house before he and Jason went off to school. But that’s it. I could never bring myself to ask my brother any more.
His gaze flicks past me to the window over the sink, where the afternoon light cuts in a slanted bar across the faucet. “My mom left when I was ten,” he says, and I can hear how careful he’s being with the words. “One day she was there, and then she wasn’t. I don’t remember that much about her, to be honest.”
I swallow. “What about your dad?”
He drags a hand over the back of his neck, eyes still on the window. “He stuck around until I went to college. The day I left, he packed up. Like having responsibility for me was the last thread keeping him grounded, and once I was gone, there wasn’t any point pretending. I came back for a long weekend that fall and the place was empty—no note, no forwarding address, nothing. Haven’t seen him since.”
I think of Jason’s stories—the time he and Ben built a ramp out of plywood behind the garage and tried to jump the creek, how Mom bandaged Ben’s knee in the kitchen like he belonged to us; how Dad bought him boots and told him to quit arguing about the receipt. I remember a lanky boy half a step behind my brother, always looking like he’d rather do the heavy lifting than stand still and be looked at.
I remember how quiet he used to get when Mom hugged him. Like he didn’t know what to do with it.
There’s pressure in my chest. I rub it lightly with my palm.
“You never heard from him?” I ask, even though he’s just told me no. It’s something to say while I fight the part of me that wants to cross the room and hug him. The part that keeps getting me in trouble.
“No.” His mouth lifts at one corner, humorless. “I used to check the mail like a stray dog hoping for a bone, jump every time the phone rang. Then I stopped.”
“And your mom?” My voice is barely there.
