Chapter 2

'Didn't I work hard today too? Why do you hang out bedding for Derek and Chloe and leave me with a cold piece of blanket?' I didn't bother saying my thoughts out loud. There was no point.

My mother went quiet on the other end of the line. She hadn't expected her always-obedient son to talk back. It didn't last. Her voice slid right back into its usual bossy register.

"You've always been the healthy one, easy to raise," she said. "Your brother and sister are delicate. Is it really so much to ask that you cut them some slack? Why do you get more difficult every year?"

I laughed. Someone who'd spent years sleeping in a space under the stairs that never saw sunlight, eating whatever leftovers were left in the fridge — how healthy did she think that made me? The truth was simpler: she just didn't care.

When I was ten, I'd come down with a fever bad enough to keep me in bed. My parents had been too busy — one shuttling Derek to his instrument lessons, the other dropping Chloe off at preschool — to notice. They'd left me alone in the house all day.

If the neighbors hadn't found me, the fever might have killed me right there. All I ever got for it, afterward, was one careless line, "He's a tough kid. He can take it."

My mother's voice cut back in, irritated. "Why aren't you saying anything? Look at you — I can't even get two words in without you sulking. You used to be the easy one. Be good, and go make up your brother and sister's beds."

Then she hung up.

Before the call cut off, I caught my father and my siblings laughing in the background — something had amused them. The sound grated on me like nails on glass.

Out on the balcony, Derek's and Chloe's bedding hung neatly in a row. I ran my hand over it.

It felt warm. The warmth only made the cold in my chest worse. Even the fabric had been chosen with care — the material, the color, the pattern, all of it soaked in a kind of attention I'd never once been given.

Then I looked back at my own bed, tucked into that cramped space under the stairs, piled with clothes nobody else wanted anymore. What was actually spread across it barely counted as bedding — mismatched sizes, colors that clashed. The irony wasn't lost on me.

Once the beds were made, I sat down on the couch and scrolled through my phone without really looking for anything.

Derek's latest post showed the four of them beaming for the camera, captioned: [The simplest happiness is just being together as a family.]

Underneath, my parents and Chloe had left a chorus of likes and comments: [We'll always be this happy.]

One relative had noticed something was off and commented: [Where's Ryan? I don't see him in the photo.]

My mother had answered fast: [He's just a little difficult sometimes.] She'd added a sighing emoji.

I knew exactly what she meant by that. She meant the tension I'd carried my whole life — the way wanting to be loved had only ever made me more careful, more guarded, around the people who were supposed to love me back. But Mom, I wanted to say, that carefulness was me trying as hard as I could to belong.

I was still scrolling through years of my mother's old posts, tears running down my face without my even noticing, when the four of them came home, laughing.

The laughter stopped dead the second they saw me.

Derek's voice cut through the silence, complaining. "You scared me half to death! What's with the gloomy act this late at night? Who's that supposed to be for?" He pressed a hand to his chest, breathing a little too hard.

Before I could get a word out, the whole family had turned to him, full of concern. "Derek, are you okay? Does anything hurt? Should we take you to the hospital?"

"Don't be scared, I'll protect you," Chloe said.

I looked up at all of them. In that moment, I didn't fit into that family, didn't fit with any of them. And the way they looked back at me — it was the way you'd look at something not quite human.