Chapter two

The drive home was quiet in a way that felt loud.

Diane hummed under her breath, replaying the night in small pleased fragments. "Didn't I tell you he was wonderful? And Callum seems so polite. A little quiet, but polite."

"He's fine," Ivy said, watching the streetlights slide past the window.

She wasn't going to say it out loud. Not tonight, not ever, probably. But the truth sat heavy in her chest the whole ride home, the same truth she'd been carrying since junior year, since the day Callum Reyes had leaned over in AP History and asked to borrow a pen, and she'd handed it to him and felt something in her rearrange itself permanently.

She'd loved him quietly. Not the loud kind of love that got written into yearbooks, the kind that got confessed at lockers with shaking hands. The kind that lived in small observations instead. The way he always finished his lunch fast so he could get outside before the bell. The way he never raised his hand in class but always knew the answer when called on. The way he used to walk the long way around the courtyard, and how she'd noticed once, and then noticed again, until she understood she was noticing on purpose.

She'd never told anyone. Not her best friend from high school, not her mother, not even the diary she'd kept for exactly four months in tenth grade before she got scared someone would find it and stopped writing in it altogether. It had felt safer that way. A feeling that stayed hers and hers alone couldn't be laughed at, couldn't be turned down, couldn't be wasted on someone who'd probably never once thought about her back.

And now he was going to be her stepbrother.

The word landed strange in her head, ill-fitting, like a shirt two sizes off. Stepbrother. Family. The one boy she'd spent so long quietly wanting was about to share her last name.

"You're quiet," Diane said, glancing over at a red light.

"Just tired."

Diane didn't push. She reached over and turned the radio up instead, some old song she liked, and Ivy let her forehead rest against the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes.

She thought about the way Callum's knee had gone rigid under the table. The way he hadn't looked at her once through the whole dinner, not directly, like looking at her cost something he couldn't afford to pay. She used to tell herself that was just how he was, private, careful, a boy who kept things close. Tonight it had felt like something else. She didn't know what, and that was the part that unsettled her most.

It didn't matter. It couldn't matter. Whatever tonight had been, whatever that charged, silent thing sitting between them at the table had been, it needed to stop being anything at all. Their parents were getting married. That much had been obvious in the way Marcus looked at her mother, the way Diane had gotten dressed like the night mattered more than dinner usually did. This wasn't a maybe. This was a family being built, brick by brick, right in front of her.

And Ivy was not going to be the reason it fell down.

Her phone buzzed as she was getting ready for bed. An unknown number, a 555 area code she didn't recognize.

Unknown: This is Callum. Got your number from my dad's phone. Hope that's not weird.

Her stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with nerves this time.

Ivy: It's fine. What's up?

The three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched them like they might tell her something important.

Callum: Wanted to say sorry if tonight was awkward. Wasn't expecting you to be the one walking in.

Ivy: You knew we were doing dinner with a "daughter." Guess you didn't put it together.

Callum: I put it together the second your mom said your name on the phone last week. Just didn't think it'd actually feel like that once you walked through the door.

Ivy read that twice. Feel like that. She turned the phrase over, looking for a shape to it, and found none.

Ivy: Feel like what?

Callum: Don't know yet. Ask me again in six months.

She huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh.

Ivy: That's not an answer.

Callum: It's the only one I've got tonight.

Callum: Tonight was harder than I expected. Not sure why. I should go.

Ivy: Callum.

No response. The three dots didn't come back.

Ivy sat there in the dark of her room, phone glowing in her hand, heart going fast and stupid, replaying five words until they lost all shape. Harder than I expected. Harder how. Harder because of her, or harder because his whole life was quietly rearranging itself around two people getting married in May, and she was just one more thing on a very long list.

She didn't sleep for a long time.

The wedding date got set two weeks later. May, at a small venue outside town, six months away. Diane cried happy tears over the calendar. Marcus started talking about house listings before the cake was even chosen, four bedrooms, good school district, close enough to Ashford State that Callum could stay home for his last year and save on rent.

Ivy sat through all of it with a smile that felt glued in place, one thought circling underneath everything else, quiet and constant as a heartbeat.

In six months, she was going to be living under the same roof as the boy who'd once asked to borrow a pen and never given it back. The boy who now texted her half a sentence and then vanished before finishing it.

And she had abso

lutely no idea what any of it meant.