He stares like he doesn’t know who I am, and it breaks something fragile inside me.
“Let me explain,” Paige says, voice shaking now. “Please.”
“No,” he says, pointing at the door like he’s ejecting a drunk. “No, you’ve explained enough.”
“Jason.” Her eyes flash. “I am not sixteen. I don’t answer to you.”
Something ugly flickers across his face. “You think that’s what this is?” he asks. “You think this is about me playing big brother? This is about trust. He was my family.”
The word hits me like a second punch. I swallow it and the taste of blood and keep my hands down.
He was my family. Was.
Paige takes a shaky breath. I can feel her lining up the truth we haven’t told him yet, I can feel it in the way the air thins aroundus. My whole body goes still. Not like this. Not with that look in his eyes. Please, not like this.
But she doesn’t say it. “We should have told you,” she says instead, voice low. “We were going to—”
“When?” Jason hurls the word like a glass. “When I walked in on you fucking my best friend? In the back room of a bar? Jesus, Paige.”
“That’s enough,” I say, and my tone hardens to steel. “I warned you about speaking to her like that. Paige is not to blame here. You want to blame anyone, blame me.”
“Oh, I do blame you,” he says, disgust dripping from every word. “I blame you for all of it. I brought you into my life, let you stay in my home. And this is how you repay me? Helping yourself to my sister?”
I see the set of his shoulder, the next swing he’s calculating.
But he doesn’t take it. He just looks at me, then at Paige, and shakes his head.
“I can’t even be in here,” he says, and now he looks sick, like the office air is tainted. “I can’t—” He shakes his head hard, like he can shake the picture out of it. “I can’t look at you right now.”
“Jason,” Paige whispers, and that’s the first time she sounds small. It guts me.
He steps backward, hand groping for the knob like he needs it to hold him up. He gets the door halfway open and then flicks his eyes back to me, one last lightning strike. “We’re done,” he says.
The words hit me right in the center, worse than the blow to my face.
“Jason, no,” she says. “I’m not letting you throw fourteen years away over what youthinkyou know.”
His mouth twitches. “Watch me.”
He looks at Paige. For a flicker of a moment, the anger moves aside for the hurt, and it makes him look younger and older at the same time. “You, I don’t even—” He stops himself, swallows.
“Jason—” she tries again, desperate, the truth right there in her mouth.
He slashes a hand through the air. “No. I don’t want to hear anything from either of you. Ever.”
He’s gone before I can get another word in. The door slams hard enough to rattle the framed certificates and send a shower of dust down from the HVAC vent. Someone out in the bar laughs, a too-bright normal sound that makes me want to throw the door open and shout at the whole room to shut the hell up.
I stand there, breathing like I ran a marathon, jaw a drum of pain, knuckles white where I’ve been holding my hands up to a man I love like a brother.
Jason’s “we’re done” is still echoing when the door rattles in its frame and the room snaps back into focus—the crooked stack of invoices, the pen on the floor, Paige’s breath hitching.
She’s on me in a heartbeat. “Let me see,” she says, already reaching for my face. Her fingers are careful, hovering just shy of skin, like she’s afraid to make it worse.
“It’s fine,” I say, and it comes out rough. I taste copper, feel the throb setting up camp under my eye, a hot bloom that’s going to go purple quickly. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” she says. She tilts my chin a little, and I let her. I can still see the way Jason looked at me. Furious, hurt, betrayed. Like a dog that’s been kicked by someone it trusted.
“I should go after him,” I say. If I can get him in the alley, if I can just get one sentence in before he slams the door on me again—
