Page 140 of At First Spark
His attention comes back to me.
“Do what?”
“Look around like the whole world moved while I was gone.”
The answer comes without hesitation. “It might’ve.”
That leaves no room for argument.
For a second, neither of us says anything. The air thickens around us, humid and waiting. Somewhere out past the lane, thunder rolls low enough to feel more than hear.
“Come inside,” he says.
I follow him because the storm is coming, because he asked, and because those have somehow become equally compelling reasons.
The inside of his house feels different this evening. Not exactly safer, because safe has become a word with too many conditions attached to it. But steadier. The lamps are already on, warm light pushing back the deepening gray beyond the windows. Claire has been here—obvious from the covered dish on the counter and the note propped against the fruit bowl in the same neat handwriting as always.
Check the weather radio tonight. And eat the casserole before it dries out.
I laugh before I can stop myself.
Holt glances up from where he’s filling Rook’s water bowl. “Mom stopped by.”
“I gathered.”
“She thinks weather can be solved with casserole.”
“She might not be wrong.”
That does earn me a real smile. Quick and crooked and young enough that I can see, for one instant, the easier version of him everyone keeps referencing. The one who laughed quicker and carried less and probably drove Claire half insane by pretending he didn’t need anything.
I miss him a little, that version, even though I never knew him. Maybe because I can see how much of him is still here.
We eat at the kitchen counter because neither of us suggests otherwise. The casserole is absurdly good in the way things only taste when somebody who loves you made them specifically to keep you standing. Rook settles under my stool and sighs dramatically every time one of us fails to drop something worth his attention.
The domesticity of it would be almost funny if it didn’t feel so dangerous.
Not because it’s false, but because I am sitting in Holt’s kitchen while another storm builds outside, eating food his mother left for him in dishes she probably told him to return, and some part of me has already stopped thinking of this as temporary in the clean, uncomplicated way I promised myself it would stay.
That thought follows me when I help him clear the plates. When we secure the windows. When he checks the weather radio like Claire told him to, muttering under his breath about her knowing him too well.
And when Hadley lets herself in without knocking twenty minutes later carrying a tote bag and enough energy to fill the whole room by herself.
“I brought board games,” she announces.
I blink. “Why?”
She tosses the tote onto the couch and looks between the two of us like the answer should be obvious. “Because if the power goes out and you two sit here in moody silence, I’ll feel personally responsible for the weirdness.”
Holt leans one hip against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. “You don’t even live here.”
“That has never once stopped me.”
Hadley steps farther inside, spots the dishes on the rack, the closed blinds, the weather radio on the counter, and her expression softens just enough for me to realize she’s not here by accident.
For the next hour, we sit in the living room with a deck of cards and a board game Hadley insists is “way more fun if everyone is a little competitive and moderately emotionally unwell.” She and Holt slide into a rhythm that belongs entirely to siblings who have spent a lifetime tormenting each other for sport. It is fast and affectionate and relentless. Hadley cheats loudly and denies it louder. Holt rolls his eyes so often it becomes a language all its own. At one point, she flicks a playing card at his face with deadly accuracy, and he catches it without looking, which makes her swear at him with obvious pride.
Watching them does something strange to my chest. Mostly, it makes me understand another piece of him. The one who could still be funny in spite of everything. The one who learned how to carry responsibility without letting it kill whatever brightness used to live underneath it. The one who makes room, even now, for the people who claim him.
