Page 114 of Fate, Interrupted

I look at him, realizing what Norah is in relation to the situation. The situation being temporary in the family’s understanding of it. A phase that will pass and leave nothing behind except maybe a story Henry tells at some future dinner table about the time Silas had a summer fling with a human.

“I guess she’s fine,” I say.

Henry nods again, easy, already moving on in his mind. “Probably for the best,” he says, half to himself, in the tone of someone thinking out loud rather than making an argument. “Things settling down on their own. Less complicated that way.”

He reads my comment wrong, but what he says is meant kindly.

That is the part that hits hardest.

He means it with the complete affectionate goodwill of a man who loves his brother and has concluded, without malice, without pressure, with the natural assumption of someone who knows how these things go in this family, that it is running its course. That Silas will come back to himself, to the structure, to the life that has been built around him, because that’s what Silas always does.

They are all waiting me out.

Not cruelly. Not as a strategy. They’re doing it the same way you wait out the weather—with patience and the comfortable certainty that the sky will return to its clear, sunny state, because that’s what it always does.

Henry finishes his drink and throws the bottle in the recycle bin. He’s about to head back downstairs. I can see him gathering himself for it.

He stands there, looking at the floor, the way he looks at things he’s been sitting with for a while and finally decides to speak.

I wait.

“I think about Mom sometimes,” he says. “I was too little to really know her. But I remember…” He stops. “I remember she laughed differently when Dad wasn’t home.”

I look at him.

He looks back, and what’s in his face is not grief exactly. More complicated than grief. The look of a man who has been carrying this his whole life and has never found the right moment to say it out loud.

“Yeah,” I say. “She did.”

I haven’t said that to anyone. Logan was old enough to notice and has spent his life avoiding subjects that would complicate his relationship with our father. Greer probably knows and has kept it where he keeps everything that isn’t his to name. My father built twenty-five years of grief around a version of his wife that was real but incomplete.

I will never tell him. Some truths cannot be unsaid, and this one would serve no one still living.

Henry was four when she died. He remembers her in pieces: the sound of her laugh, the smell of her perfume. He doesn’t have a full picture. Just the joy, and that it was different when our father wasn’t home—the instinct of a man who feels things more clearly than he lets on.

He nods slowly. We don’t need language for what passes between us—the shorthand of brothers who grew up in the same house and learned, separately and together, to read the things that were never said in it.

Then he straightens. Pushes off the counter. And I brace for the easy exit, the deflection, the grin that closes the door on anything too real.

He doesn’t grin.

He looks at me. “You’re leaving,” he says.

I meet his eyes. “Yeah,” I say.

He exhales. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. He looks at the table, then back at me, and his expression does what it rarely does. It opens.

“I won’t say anything,” he says. “To Dad or Logan.” A pause. “Not that they won’t figure it out.”

“They will,” I say.

“Okay.” He crosses the kitchen toward me, and I don’t move, and he stops a foot away and looks at me the way he looked at me at the lake—warm and direct and without agenda.

“For what it’s worth, I like her. A lot.” He pauses, choosing the exact weight of the words. “I liked her in the parking lot. I liked her at trivia. I liked that she didn’t let Matt push her around on the loading dock.”

The corner of his mouth lifts into a small, genuine smile. “I hope you and Norah are happy, Silas. I genuinely do.”

My chest opens up. I wasn’t expecting that.