Page 168 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
My father looks at him for a long second, whatever passes between them in that silence feeling older than the room. Not sentimental. Not soft. Something heavier than that. A recognition, maybe. One wounded thing measuring another and deciding not to make him bleed for speaking.
“You protected her,” my father says at last. “Nothing else needs to be said.”
The words settle into the kitchen with more force than any lecture could have.
Silas doesn’t argue. Doesn’t rush to explain. Doesn’t throw his guilt into the room in that rough, half-angry way he does when he wants to get ahead of his own shame. He just nods once, the look on his face so raw, I have to glance away before it undoes me completely.
My mother, who has been standing in a kind of tense stillness since the front door shut behind the Warden, finally exhales, sitting down at the table. Then, as if some stubborn, maternal instinct in her has decided that if the world insists on being ugly, she will answer it with snacks and domestic force, she starts laying out everything she must have bought on the way home. Crackers. Chips. Chocolate-covered almonds. Granola bars. Three different kinds of cookies. A bowl of fruit that no one is going to touch while the cookies exist.
The whole spread looks almost ridiculous under the circumstances.
Which is maybe why it hurts my chest the way it does.
“No one in this house,” she says, not looking at any one person in particular, “is going to be tied to their past.”
The sentence lands and keeps landing.
Because she doesn’t say it as a platitude. She says it like a decision. Like a boundary she is drawing around all of us. Around me. Around Silas. Around the whole mess of blood, damage and history that keeps trying to follow us through the front door and call itself destiny.
Then her eyes go to Silas properly, something softening in her face.
“You’re our family now, Silas,” she says. “Whatever comes our way, we will handle it.”
The room goes very still after that.
I should feel guilty.
Part of me does.
I should want to tell them everything, every last forbidden, breathless, impossible detail of what has happened between Silas and me. I should want to confess it like a crime before the kindness in this kitchen makes the weight of it unbearable. I should want to say, this is not clean, this is not what you think, this has already crossed lines none of us know how to redraw.
But I don’t.
Or at least, the urge is weaker than it should be.
Because as we all sit down, as my mother keeps fussing with the snacks like feeding people is her way of pulling them back from the edge, as my father finally leans back in his chair and some of the hardness leaves his face, I catch the look that passes between him and Silas.
It is brief.
Too brief to call out.
But it is there.
A glance. A flicker of understanding. Something private, yet unsettling and oddly steadying all at once.
Suddenly, a strange certainty settles over me.
Maybe I don't have to say anything.
One of them might already know.
CHAPTER 35
Octavia
“Kadin hasn’t been to class all week,” Cheyenne says, tossing a piece of popcorn into the air before catching it neatly in her mouth. The grin she throws over at me is all teeth and satisfaction, the kind that says she is enjoying this far more than she should.
“Probably needed time to heal,” Silas mutters.
