"Good." A breath. "Because I mean it, sweetheart. There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do. Nothing I wouldn't give up. If it came down to it—if I ever had to choose between what was comfortable and what was right for you—I wouldn't hesitate. Not for a second."
I hold the tea strainer over the cup and don't pour. She means it. That's the thing about Margot—she doesn't say things like this unless she's been carrying them for a while, and she's been carrying this one long enough that it came out on a phone call from a hotel in Connecticut. She probably preferred it this way than to see me roll my eyes.
"Mom. I'm okay."
"I know you are."
"Then why does this feel like a speech?"
She laughs. Short, wet at the edges. "Because I'm dramatic. And because we’ve been gone long enough that I missed my baby boy and wanted to tell him how much I love him before I spend forty-eight hours pretending to enjoy a vineyard tour."
I smile. "You like wine."
"I like drinking wine. I do not like hearing about the soil it grew in for forty-five minutes while a man in a vest points at dirt."
"That sounds like a lot of dirt."
"It's Connecticut, sweetheart. It's all dirt and opinions."
"Go. Have fun. Enjoy your anniversary. Love you."
"Love you, sweetheart. Whatever it takes."
She hangs up. I pour my tea. I stand in the kitchen for a minute holding the mug in both hands and letting the words sit in me the way her words always sit in me—warm, heavy, true.
Whatever it takes.
I don't know what she means by it. I file it where I file everything she gives me: in the place behind my ribs where the good things live, next to the orange juice and the lemonade pitcher and the night she drove three hours to pick me up from a foster home and didn't ask a single question until I was ready.
Whatever it takes. Okay, Mom. Okay.
∞∞∞
The notebook is open on my thigh.
I'm in the lounge. The window seat—the big one, floor to ceiling, that faces the side of the house where the light goes gold in the evenings. I've been here for an hour. The house is empty—Margot and Richard in Connecticut, the brothers gone since early afternoon without telling me where. Bane's shirt is too big on me. My feet are bare. My tea went cold twenty minutes ago and I haven't gotten up to fix it because the words are coming and when the words come I don't move.
I write:
I keep waiting for the part where it stops feeling impossible.
Not the bond. The bond makes sense now—the hum in my chest, the three threads, the way I can feel them even when they're gone. That part I understand. That part I've stopped fighting.
It's the rest of it. The part where I'm sitting in a window seat in a house that belongs to my stepfather wearing my stepbrother's shirt writing in a notebook about how in love I am with all three of his sons. That part. The part where I know exactly what I am and who I belong to and the sentence sounds insane from the outside and feels like the truest thing I've ever—
The front door clicks.
I stop writing. My pen hovers over the page. The bond in my chest shifts—three threads, all at once, going from distant-steady to close-and-wrongin the space between one heartbeat and the next.
They're home.
Wrong. Something happened.
I close the notebook. Set it on the window seat. Stand.
The foyer is a floor down and I can hear them from here—the door shutting, keys in the bowl, the specific weight of three sets of footsteps I've learned to tell apart. Atlas's are even. Measured. The same interval between each step regardless ofhis mood. Bane's are slightly heavier on the left—he favors that side when he's tired. Zero's are the quietest, always, because Zero walks like he’s spent his whole life practicing how not to be heard.
Tonight all three sets are wrong.
