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Brady, you okay?

I manage two words.

Not really

Her reply comes before I can set the phone down.

On my way

I’m fine. You don’t have to come. Seriously

She doesn’t answer. Which means she’s already driving.

Twenty minutes later, her knock hits my door, and when I open it, whatever’s on my face makes her breath hitch. She doesn’t ask a single question. Just steps inside, wraps her arms around me, and holds on while I fall apart against her shoulder for the second time in an hour.

“You’re okay,” she murmurs into my neck. “I’m here.”

She steers me to the couch without letting go, folds herself against my side, and waits. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t fill the silence with noise or pepper me with questions. Just breathes with me until my lungs remember how to work, and then the wholething pours out of me. Emily’s voice.Flaunting it. The niece and nephew I’ll never see grow up. The finality of it, the door slamming shut so hard the frame cracked.

Dakota’s jaw goes tight as I talk. Her fingers stay gentle on my arm while her eyes burn.

“They cut you off,” she says, “because you train at a gym.”

“Because I train atthisgym.”

“Because Victor built a place where people don’t have to lie.” She pulls out her phone.

“Dakota, don’t?—”

“Too late.”

Thirty minutes later, my apartment is full.

Cruz arrives first with two grocery bags, kicking the door shut behind him like he owns the place. Dante follows with that steady calm he carries into every crisis, squeezing my shoulder on his way past. Eli comes last, and the look on his face scares me a little—like he’s already mapped the route to my hometown and calculated exactly what he’d say to my father, and it’s taking real effort not to get in his truck.

Nobody makes it weird. Nobody makes it about anything except being here.

Cruz commandeers my stove. “I’m making my mama’s chicken and dumplings. Well. My version. Which is better.”

“Order pizza,” Dante tells me quietly, already pulling up the app. “As backup. His cooking’s a coin flip.”

“I heard that, and I’m choosing to rise above it.”

Eli sits down beside me on the couch and puts his hand on the back of my neck. Just that warm weight that finds the exact spot where I hold the tension, and presses until my shoulders drop an inch. Dakota stays curled into my other side, and I watch Cruz argue with my spice cabinet and Dante spread napkins on my coffee table like he’s done it a hundred times.

They came. All four of them. No questions, no conditions. I sent two words to one person, and my whole world showed up.

Dinner ends up being dumplingsandpizza, because Cruz’s dumplings turn out dense enough to qualify as training equipment, and he defends them anyway between bites of pepperoni. We eat crowded around my coffee table, too many people for the seating I own, and somewhere between the food and the dark outside the windows, the conversation shifts.

“My parents stopped talking to me five years ago,” Cruz offers, no preamble, staring at the slice in his hand. “I called them after I got my life together. Figured I owed them honesty after all the years of hiding. Told my dad I was bi.” He shrugs, but his jaw works. “He hung up. Just—click. Mama called back crying, saying they loved me but couldn’t support my choices. Asked if I could keep it private. Not tell anybody. Like it was a rash.”

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Said no. Said I was done hiding.” He takes a bite, chews, swallows. “They stopped answering after that. Five years of dial tone. My own mama.”

Dante sets his plate down.

“My dad found texts between me and my boyfriend when I was nineteen. Read them all, waited until I got home, and told me to get out. Said I was an embarrassment to the family name.” His voice stays level. “My mom called me after. Crying. But she wouldn’t stand up to him. Just kept saying,you know how he is. Like that was supposed to excuse it. Like keeping the peace mattered more than her son sleeping in his car.”