Mon frère Alpha m’a supplié de lui pardonner

Ivy smoothed the hem of her sweater for the third time in two minutes and told herself to stop.

"You look fine," her mother said, not looking up from the visor mirror as she checked her lipstick. 

"Better than fine."

"I didn't ask."

"You didn't have to. You've been picking at that sweater since we got in the car."

Ivy dropped her hands into her lap. Diane snapped the visor shut and turned in her seat, and for a second she looked less like a mother running late for dinner and more like a woman about to walk into something that mattered to her more than she was letting on.

"I just want tonight to go well," Diane said. "That's all."

"It's dinner, Mom. Not a court appearance."

"It's not just dinner." Diane's smile flickered, quick and a little nervous. "Marcus is important to me, Ivy. I want you to like him."

Ivy had heard the name Marcus for four months now, dropped into phone calls and casual mentions the way a person drops something they're testing the weight of. She'd met him twice, briefly, enough to know he had a steady voice and a way of looking at her mother like she'd said something remarkable even when she hadn't. She didn't dislike him. She just weighed everything twice these days, ever since her father taught her that people who seemed steady weren't always.

"I already like him fine," Ivy said. "You don't have to sell me on it."

"Tonight's different." Diane reached over and squeezed her hand once before pulling away to grab her purse. "He wants you to meet his son."

"Okay," she said. "What's he like?"

"I don't know much. He's in his last year at Ashford State. Marcus doesn't talk about him a lot, actually, I think they're close but quiet with each other." Diane opened her door. "Come on. We're already ten minutes late and you know how I get."

The restaurant was the kind with low lighting and cloth napkins, the kind Ivy's mother reserved for occasions she wanted to feel bigger than they were. Ivy followed her through the door, scanning the room out of habit more than curiosity, and found Marcus first, standing at a corner table, already smiling at the sight of them.

Then she saw who was sitting across from him.

Her stomach did the flip this time. The real one.

Callum Reyes looked up from his glass at the exact moment she registered his face, and for one long second neither of them moved, like the room had gone quiet just for them. His fingers tightened around the glass before he stood.

She hadn't seen him since the last week of senior year, when he'd walked past her locker without looking over, the way he always did.

He looked older now. Broader through the shoulders, jaw sharper, that small scar over his eyebrow still there. His expression didn't change much, but something in his eyes flickered, recognition, maybe, or the same disbelief currently pinning her feet to the floor.

"Ivy." Marcus's voice cut through it, warm and oblivious. "There she is. Come here, sweetheart, sit down."

Diane was already moving toward the table, already reaching for a hug. Ivy forced herself toward the table too.

"Ivy, this is my son, Callum," Marcus said, gesturing between them like he was handing over something precious. "Callum, this is Diane's daughter."

Callum held out his hand like they'd never met, like he hadn't once lent her a pen and never asked for it back.

"Nice to meet you," he said.

His voice was steady. Too steady. Like this was ordinary, like her whole nervous system wasn't currently rearranging itself around the fact that Callum Reyes was standing three feet away from her wearing a dark green sweater and looking at her like a stranger.

She took his hand anyway. It was warm, and his grip was brief and careful, and for half a second his eyes held hers a beat too long for two people meeting for the first time.

"You too," Ivy said, and hated how thin her own voice sounded.

They sat. Marcus started talking, something about the restaurant, about how Diane had picked it, about how he'd been looking forward to this all week, and Ivy nodded in the right places and heard almost none of it, because Callum was sitting directly across from her now, close enough that she could see the small line between his eyebrows, the same one he used to get when a teacher called on him and he hadn't been listening.

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the table, at his glass, anywhere that wasn't her face.

"So," Diane said brightly, unaware of anything, "how long have you two known each other?"

The question landed in the middle of the table like something dropped from a height.

Ivy opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

Callum answered instead, voice even, unreadable. "We went to the same high school."

"Small world," Marcus said, delighted, completely missing the way Callum's jaw had tightened, the way Ivy's hands had gone still in her lap.

Diane laughed, reaching for her water glass, already moving the conversation somewhere else, some story about the restaurant's owner she wanted to tell. Ivy let the sound of it wash past her, because underneath the table, close enough that no one else could have noticed, Callum's knee had gone rigid an inch from hers, like he was holding himself perfectly still to keep from letting it touch her by accident.

Marcus beamed between them like the who

le night was going exactly as planned.