She plucks the flowers from her mother’s lap without acknowledging me further and walks to the far cabinet to grab a vase.
I lean against the bookshelf, arms crossed. “So... you’re still using that ‘resting bitch face’ as a full-time personality trait, huh?”
She turns just enough to look at me, her eyes flat. “You still pretending you’re charming?”
“Ouch.” I press a hand to my chest. “You wound me.”
“Not nearly enough.” she fires back, plucking the stems and snipping the ends like she’s imagining it’s my neck instead.
“I have a pair of scissors in my hand, Jaxon.”
I hold up my hands in surrender, laughing as I take a step back.
Before she can say something sharper, Jonathan pushes through the opposite door at the far end of the library, flipping through some papers in a dark blue leather ledger.
“I figured I’d find you two in a standoff.”
“Three guesses who started it,” I’m talking to him but keeping my eyes on her.
Cassidy snips the shears at me like a threat. I wink back.
“Don’t need three,” he mutters, coming to a stop. “She eat anything yet?” He nods toward his mother.
Cassidy shakes her head, returning her attention to the flowers. “Not yet.”
We all fall quiet, the kind of silence that never really settles—just hangs heavy between the walls like smoke.
When someone you love is dying slowly, silence stops being peaceful. It becomes a place where all the unspoken things sit. The thank-you’s you haven’t said. The apologies you keep telling yourself you’ll get to. The grief you haven’t earned yet but feel anyway.
Jonathan clears his throat. The sound is short, clipped.
“Make sure she does.”
His voice is flat—curt—like he’s giving a directive to one of his junior associates and not his sister. Not the woman who wakes up in the middle of the night to adjust their mother’s blankets, who learned how to change IV lines off YouTube and heartbreak.
Cassidy doesn’t flinch.
She just nods once and keeps arranging the flowers.
Jonathan looks at me next, all steel and tension in his stance. “Come on. I need to talk to you.”
He’s already heading toward the other side of the library, toward the room that used to be their dad’s study and now doubles as Jonathan’s home office whenever he’s here.
I offer Cassidy a slow, mocking kiss from the air—fingers to lips, hand tossed wide like I’m onstage—and her eye roll is sharp enough to draw blood.
Worth it.
I follow Jonathan through the arched doorway, stepping into the cool quiet of the study.
He leaves the door mostly shut but not fully, as if that keeps things less serious somehow. Like cracked doors can soften hard conversations.
The room’s barely changed. Dark paneled walls. Overfilled bookshelves. The smell of scotch soaked into the floorboards.
Their dad died two years ago. Massive heart attack. Dropped right in his study chair, if I remember right. No warning. No second chance. One minute he was pouring bourbon, the next, gone.
Now their mother is slipping too, but slower—piece by piece.
Whether it’s the cancer or the chemo, no one can really say. The doctors go in circles while Lilly May fights tooth and nail with a soft smile and bones that look like they might splinter in a strong wind.
