Chapter 14: "Forgiven"

The silence that followed was the worst sound I had ever heard.

It stretched for what felt like a full minute, though it was probably only a handful of seconds, the two of us sitting on opposite ends of my couch while the refrigerator hummed obliviously in the next room and somewhere outside a car alarm went off and died again. I watched him process it, watched the information travel from his ears down through the rest of him, rearranging something fundamental along the way.

Kade sat perfectly still, his hands loose on his knees, but something behind his eyes had gone dark and distant, like a door slamming shut somewhere deep inside him.

"You thought he was me," he repeated, voice flat.

"Kade "

"He knew." He rose from the couch so fast it startled me, pacing to the window with his back rigid, both fists clenched at his sides. "He knew exactly who you were. He knew what you meant. And he let you walk into that room believing it was me."

"I didn't know that part until after."

"That's not the part I'm angry about." He turned, and the fury on his face was nothing like the composed man I had come to know, raw and unfamiliar and terrifying in its intensity. "He's spent years listening to me talk about the girl from the river. Years. And the second he found you first, he took what he knew belonged to me."

"I don't belong to anyone, Kade."

"That's not what I meant." He dragged a hand down his face, some of the fury draining into something closer to exhaustion. "I mean he knew what you were to me before you ever knew what he was pretending to be. That's not rivalry. That's cruelty."

"He didn't force me into anything," I said quietly. "I wanted it. I thought it was you I wanted, but the choice was still mine."

Kade fell silent again, jaw working, and I watched him fight some private battle behind his eyes for a long, unbearable minute. He walked to my window and stood there with his back to me, shoulders rigid, staring out at nothing in particular while the city carried on beneath us, indifferent to the wreckage happening eleven stories above it.

I almost said something to fill the silence, some useless apology I'd already offered twice, but I made myself stay quiet instead, letting him work through it at his own pace. It felt important, somehow, to let him have that.

"Why are you telling me this now?" he finally asked, turning back around, his voice quieter than before. "After weeks of letting me take you to dinner. After the bookstore."

"Because I couldn't let you keep looking at me like that without knowing the whole truth first. You deserved to hear it from me before you heard it from him, twisted into something worse than it was."

Something in his shoulders loosened, just slightly, the anger folding back into the careful control I recognized.

"You could have kept it from me," he said. "Most people would have."

"I'm not most people."

A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth, gone almost before it appeared. He crossed the room and knelt in front of where I sat, taking both my hands in his, his thumbs tracing slow, grounding circles over my knuckles the way his brother had done days earlier, except it felt entirely different coming from him.

"I'm not going to pretend it doesn't bother me," he said. "It does. It probably always will, a little. But I understand why it happened. You were looking for a mole and a memory, and he handed you both, knowing exactly what he was doing."

"Are we all right?"

"We're all right," he said, though something dark still lingered behind his eyes when he said it.

He stayed longer than I expected him to after that, the two of us sitting in the kind of quiet that felt earned rather than uncomfortable. He made me tea I didn't ask for, moving around my small kitchen like he'd already memorized where everything lived, opening cabinets with an unhurried confidence that should have annoyed me and somehow didn't.

"You keep your mugs in a strange order," he observed, pulling down two mismatched cups. "Alphabetical by what's printed on them, not by size."

"It makes sense to me."

"I didn't say it didn't." A small, genuine smile tugged at his mouth, the first one since I'd told him the truth. "It's very you. Organized in a way nobody else would think to organize things, and completely uninterested in whether anyone else understands it."

For a while I let myself forget there was a second Carter brother anywhere in the city at all.

"Can I ask you something?" I said eventually, curled into the corner of my couch with the mug warming my hands.

"Anything."

"Does it bother you? That he found me first?"

Kade considered the question longer than I expected, staring into his own untouched tea. "It used to feel like everything was a competition between us. Grades, sports, women, doesn't matter. He always needed to win, and for a long time I let him, because losing to Killian was easier than fighting him for something I actually wanted." His eyes lifted to mine, steady and unflinching. "I'm not letting him win this one."

"I'm not a trophy, Kade."

"No," he agreed quietly. "You're the first thing either of us has ever wanted for the right reasons. That's exactly why he won't be able to let it go easily."

He set his tea down, untouched, and looked at me with an intensity that made the small hairs on my arms rise. "Do you know what it's like, growing up as the reflection of someone else? Every achievement halved because there's a second version of you standing three feet away doing something equally impressive. Every failure doubled because people assume if one of us can be reckless, we both secretly want to be. I spent twenty-eight years being told I was the responsible half of a matched set. You're the first thing that's ever made me want to be selfish."

I didn't have a response for that. I wasn't sure one existed.

He pressed a kiss to my knuckles, lingering there far longer than necessary. "But Mia. I need you to promise me something."

"What?"

"The next time he tells you something that sounds like the truth," Kade said quietly, "come to me before you believe it. Whatever it is."

I should have asked him why he needed that promise specifically. I should have pushed harder.

Instead I just nodded, filing it away as one more strange, unsettled thing between two brothers I still didn't fully understand, with no idea how soon I would need to remember it.

He left a little after midnight, pressing one last kiss to my forehead at the door, gentle in a way that felt like both an apology and a promise. I locked up behind him and stood in my dark living room for a long time afterward, my tea gone cold on the counter, wondering how a conversation that started with a confession had somehow ended with me feeling like the one who'd been forgiven.