I want to scream. I want to sayI chose this. I chose them. I am standing right here and I chose every single moment of it and my designation doesn't make that less true. But my voice is gone. The shame took it. The old familiar shame that pills were supposed to fix and distance was supposed to cure and love was supposed to make irrelevant—except it's not irrelevant. Not here. Not now. Not in a foyer at three in the morning with my mother's secret and my stepfather's disgust and three men I love being rewritten into monsters because of what I am.
"He's not a child, Margot," Zero says. Hard. "He's not a victim. He chose—"
"He's twenty years old forfuckssake!"
I flinch so hard I feel my knees are going to give out. She’s livid, she’s horrified. I can’t catch my breath.
"He's twenty years old and he's been through more than most people survive in a lifetime. He knows what he wants. He's not confused, he's not manipulated, he's—"
"Zero,enough," Atlas says. Not a suggestion.
"No. Not enough. She needs to hear—"
Richard is looking back and forth between his sons, horrified.
"She doesn't need to hear anything from you right now, Zero—"
"The hell she doesn't. Max is standing right here and you're talking about him like he's not in the room—"
"Because every time you open your mouth you make it worse—"
"—he's not broken, Atlas. He doesn't need you to explain him—"
"Stop." Bane. Firmer than I've ever heard him. "Both of you. Stop. Margot—we never meant for anyone to get hurt. Max is safe with us. He's always been safe—"
"Safe?" Margot's voice is barely holding. "You call thissafe? My son is standing in your foyer at three in the morning with tears drying on his face and you're telling me he's safe?"
They're all talking. All of them. Talking over each other, talking at Margot, talking about me. Atlas is trying to control the narrative. Bane is trying to soften it. Zero is trying to defend it. Three men, three strategies, all of them about me, none of them from me.
I open my mouth to say something—anything—
Richard covers his eyes.
Both hands. Palms pressing into his eye sockets, fingers digging into his forehead. He stands there behind Margot with his hands over his face and his chest expanding in slow, massive breaths, and I watch him process. Watch the information travel through him—three sons, their stepbrother, one house, monthsof it, all four of us, under his roof. I can see the moment it lands. The moment the full shape of it clicks into place behind his hands.
He drops his hands.
He picks up the lamp from the console table—the one Margot leaves on, the little brass one with the cream shade—and he hurls it into the wall.
The crash is enormous. Glass and brass and plaster, the shade crumpling, the bulb popping in a bright flash that leaves spots in my vision. Margot screams. I flinch. The foyer goes from argument to violence in the space of a breath and the silence after the crash is worse than the sound.
"Dad—" Bane starts.
"Don't." Richard's voice is something I've never heard. Not the measured baritone. Not the patriarch. This is guttural, shredded, the voice of a man who has ripped something open inside himself and can't close it. "Don't youdarecall me that right now."
Bane and Atlas move at the same time. Not toward Richard—toward me. They step in front of me, shoulder to shoulder. Bane on my left, Atlas on my right. A wall. Not the wall that manages me. The wall that protects me. I can feel the difference in their bonds—not control, not strategy. Fear.
Richard is pacing. Three steps one way, three steps back. His hands are shaking. The lamp is in pieces on the floor and he's stepping on the glass and doesn't feel it through his rubber-bottom slippers.
"Under my roof," he says. Pacing. "Under my goddamn roof. My sons. My—" He whirls on Atlas. "You. You sick son of a bitch. You're the oldest. You were supposed to—he's akid, Atlas. He's a fucking kid and he's your brother and you—the three of you—you've been, what? Taking turns? Passing him around like—"
"That's enough." Atlas. His voice is sharp like I've never heard from him—cold. Blade-cold. "You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know anything about what's happened in this house and you will not stand here and reduce him to—"
"Reduce HIM?" Richard's face has gone purple. "I'mreducing—YOUreduced him! The three of you—" He's tripping over the words, the new information crashing into the old fury, rearranging everything as it goes. "She didn't know. Margot didn't know you three were—she couldn't have known. And I didn't know about him. We brought a boy into this house and we thought he was safe because we trusted our sons and none of us—" He stops. Swallows. Starts again, worse. "But you three knew. You figured out what he was. You smelled it or sensed it or whatever the hell it is—and you didn't tell us. You didn't come to me. You didn't protect him. You just—took him. While we were sleeping down the hall thinking he was safe."
"He's not—"
"—you took a boy who trusted this family and you—all three of you—"
