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“It’s a nineteen-year-old’s take and you’re twenty, which is worse.”

“The caretaker keeps it because they’ve weighed it and decided the truth would cost more than the silence,” she says. “That’s not cowardice. That’s picking up the heavier thing on purpose so the person you love doesn’t have to carry it.”

“Or it’s deciding for them. Taking the choice out of their hands and calling it a gift.”

“Sometimes people can’t hold the choice, Theo.”

“Everybody thinks that. About everybody. It’s the most arrogant thing a person can —”

I stop.

I should be arguing the branch. The build. Instead I’m arguing the thing itself, because she’s wrong, she’s so wrong it’s got my jaw tight, and I can hear my own father in the exact shape of what she’s defending. I did it to protect you. I did it so you wouldn’t have to choose. The whole architecture of a man who ran a second family for years and called every lie of it love.

And this is where the warm room in my chest goes cold and small, because this is the one drawer I keep shut for everyone.

“My dad kept a secret to protect people,” I say, and it’s out before the wall can stop it, low and careful, like something I’m setting down instead of saying. “Had a whole other family. Told himself the whole time he was sparing everybody. You know what sparing everybody looked like? It looked like my mom finding out at the same time the lawyers did. Your caretaker and my coward are the same guy. He just got to pick the word.”

She goes still.

And I watch her do the thing she does — the read, the fast recalibration — except this time she’s not managing the room, she’s just looking at me like I handed her something heavier than she asked for. Which I did. I don’t take it back. The silence stretches long enough that the pipes fill it.

“That’s not fair,” she says finally. Softer. Not backing down — she doesn’t back down — but different. “Using your actual life to win a class argument.”

“You started it with my mom.”

“I did.” A beat. “That was cheap. I’m sorry.”

Margo, apologizing. Unprompted. I don’t have a box for it, and I’ve stopped being surprised that I don’t have a box for her, which is its own kind of alarm — because the whole point of boxing people is that they can’t surprise you, and she does it about twice an hour.

“Here’s what I actually think,” she says, and now she’s not performing at all, the bright thing gone somewhere I can’t see it, and this is the voice I heard once in the dark on the third floor. The real one. Not the version she hands the room. “I think you think it’s cowardice because your dad made it cowardice. And I think I think it’s caretaking because —” She stops. Recalibrates. Puts the bright back on, but a beat too late, so I catch the seam. “Because it’s a good defense and I’m the defender. That’s all. Professional opinion.”

“That’s not what you were going to say.”

“It’s what I’m saying.”

“Margo.”

“Build the branch.”

And there it is — her wall, going up as fast and hard as mine ever does. I recognize the move because it’s mine, because under the sniping and the coats and the color-coded grid, we’re the exact same animal: two people who’d rather argue about a secret than admit we’re sitting on one.

The study room is glass on three sides and the third floor is dead and it’s eleven-forty at night, and there’s a table between us that has stopped being a wall.

She’s got her chin up, still braced for the fight, color high in her face. I’ve got the whole argument still hot in my chest and nowhere to put it. And here’s the thing about arguing with Margo that I figured out three months ago and have been pretending I didn’t: it runs on the exact same wiring as the other thing. The wanting. Somewhere in the last five minutes the two circuits crossed, the way they always cross, and this time there’s no party to blame and no countdown to hide inside.

I know how this ends. I knew it when I sat down. I’ve known it for eight days.

I do it anyway.

I don’t know who moves.

That’s the honest version, and I’ll stand by it. One second we’re glaring at each other over a legal pad, and the next the chair scrapes — hers or mine, I couldn’t testify — and the two feet are gone, my hand’s fisted in her scraped-back hair and hers are twisted in the flannel over my chest, and we’re kissing like the argument by other means. Because it is. Because it’s the only way either of us knows how to lose to the other one and not hate it.

It’s not New Year’s. New Year’s was a question. This isn’t a question. This is eight days of pretending and three months of a stone in my boot cashing in at once, and she makes a sound against my mouth I’ve heard exactly once and thought about a thousand times since.

“This is a terrible idea,” she breathes, already climbing into my lap, straddling me in the chair, the crewneck riding up under my hands.

“Worst one either of us has had.” I get my mouth on her throat, that spot under her jaw, and she arches, and her hips roll down against me once, involuntary, and I feel it go all the way through me. “Tell me to stop.”