ANDREW POPE CODY

The memory of the family shifting around your arrival never really stopped feeling like a slow, grinding readjustment of bones that had already been broken once and never set right. Andrew had spent the first years of his life learning the exact shape of the Cody household—every sound, every expectation, every silence that meant Smurf was angry or thinking or deciding something that would later be delivered as fact. He had learned to read the house the way others learned to read books, because inside it, his survival depended on noticing everything before it could become a threat. He had not been consulted when Smurf brought you home. He had come back from the garage one evening, engine grease still embedded in the creases of his knuckles, and found a girl sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of food you hadn't touched. Smurf stood at the counter, watching you with that particular expression Andrew knew too well—the one that said you were measuring the worth of something new, calculating how it might be useful. You had looked up at him then, your eyes hollow and cautious, your face too sharp, too wary for someone your age. Andrew had seen Julia in that doorway for a moment, not because you looked alike, but because you shared the same posture of a person bracing for an argument you did not want to have.

You were given Julia's old room and the balance of that carefully memorized world tipped all at once, and Andrew couldn't decide whether he hated you for disrupting it or whether he hated himself for noticing that you didn't seem to know how to take up space in it.

You moved through the house like someone still waiting to be told to leave.

For the first several months, that had been the thing about you that Andrew couldn't stop watching. Not because you were loud or demanding or obviously disruptive, but because you were none of those things. You were too quiet, too careful, too aware of where you ended and the rest of the world began. You ate at the table like you were still surprised the food was for you, and you slept on the floor beside Julia's bed as though even the mattress was something you hadn't earned. It had unsettled something deep in his chest, a low, constant scrape of recognition that he refused to name. Because Andrew knew exactly what that felt like—that bone-deep certainty that any comfort offered could be revoked at any moment, that safety was just a pause between disappointments. He had grown up with that. He still lived with it. But he didn't know how to offer understanding to someone else, not without admitting that he understood it in himself first.

So he stayed away.

He watched you from doorways and across the dinner table, from the corner of the yard when you sat alone by the pool, from the hallway when you passed toward the laundry room as though trying not to make noise. He watched the way you folded your clothes into small, neat squares before putting them back in the bag you'd arrived with, as though you might need to leave in the middle of the night. He watched the way you let Baz talk at you about pickpocketing and misdirection, your head tilted just slightly to the side, learning, probably, but mostly pretending to agree so he'd stop looking at you like a stray that needed to justify being fed. Andrew watched the way you didn't flinch when Smurf touched your face, and it made his stomach turn, because he knew that too—the instinct to go very still when Smurf's affection landed, because moving might break whatever fragile permission was being extended. And underneath all of it, beneath the wariness and the resentment that you were sleeping in Julia's room and had somehow become the space where Julia should have been, Andrew recognized that you were already being absorbed into the family business in ways that would eventually swallow you whole.

It happened gradually, the way most Cody things happened.

Baz had started by testing you. Little things at first, harmless in the way that only people inside the family could mistake for harmless.

He'd ask you to stand outside a shop and keep watch while he spoke to someone, or to hold something for him without asking what it was. You did it all without hesitation, and after a while, the look Baz gave you shifted from patient dismissal to something closer to interest. He started teaching you in earnest after that—how to walk into a store like you belonged there, how to smile at a clerk while your hands moved beneath the counter, how to read a mark's body language so you'd know exactly when to bump into them and exactly how to make your fingers quick enough not to be felt. Smurf taught you the rest. How to stand. How to speak. How to wear your face like it wasn't a face at all but a tool, something you could angle and soften and use to make people see whatever you needed them to see.

Smurf called it being smart. She called it staying alive and you absorbed all of it, because what else were you supposed to do with the only family that had ever bothered to look at you like you might be worth keeping?

Craig and Deran had been easier.

By the time you had been there long enough to feel permanent, and they didn't care about anything except that you listened to them. You didn't roll your eyes when Craig talked too loud at dinner or when Deran interrupted him to make the story better. You didn't get annoyed when they followed you around the backyard or asked you the same question five times because they liked hearing themselves talk. They'd started calling you their sister before anyone else had used the word, and Smurf had let it happen, which meant it was true. Or true enough.

Andrew had stayed quiet through all of it.

He had his own place in the family, one carved out through years of doing exactly what Smurf needed before she had to ask. He worked at the auto body shop, came home smelling like grease and metal and the ocean, ran jobs with Baz when Smurf nodded, and kept his mouth shut about the things he saw. He lifted weights in the garage after dark and surfed to keep his head from getting too loud, and he never once allowed himself to forget that your bedroom used to belong to Julia. That was the line he couldn't cross. He could see the girl Smurf had dragged in, could see the way you were being shaped into someone useful, and he could feel the old familiar pull—the one that made him want to stand between you and whatever was coming, but you were in Julia's room and every time he let himself look at you directly, every time his eyes caught yours across the table or in the hallway, he saw all the ways you were becoming part of a family that had already proven it could discard whatever it no longer needed.

So he watched.

And sometimes, in the middle of the night, he listened.

The Jack-and-Jill bathroom between your rooms became the place where he learned the rhythm of your sleep. He'd hear you moving, sometimes—the slide of a blanket, the creak of the floorboards, the tap of water running when you washed your face at three in the morning. On bad nights, the sounds were different. Shorter and more uneven. The kind of breathing that came before a nightmare or after one, sharp and shallow. Andrew would lie in his own bed, staring at the ceiling, fingers curled into the sheet, waiting. He didn't go to you then, because he'd told himself it wasn't his place, that you weren't his to comfort, that if you needed something you would ask. But then one night the sounds had stopped entirely, replaced by a silence so complete that he'd gotten up before he'd made the decision to move. He'd walked into the bathroom on bare feet, careful, quiet, and found himself sitting on the cold tile floor beside the door that connected to your room. Just sitting there. His back against the wall, arms resting on his knees, head tipped back. He'd stayed until the light through the small bathroom window shifted from black to gray, and then he'd gone back to his own bed before you could wake up and find him there.

It happened again. Again and again, for months. He'd drift into the bathroom when your breathing turned ragged, settle beside the door, and wait.

Sometimes he'd fall asleep there without meaning to, his head lolling against the wall, and wake up with the stiff neck and a cold ache in his shoulders. One morning he woke up and saw the door to your room was open just a crack, and he'd known then that you'd seen him. He didn't mention it and you didn't either. But after that, your nightmares seemed to come less often. Or maybe you'd learned to stay quiet through them.

That was the world they'd built in two years. Wasn't much of anything, but it wasn't nothing, either.

Smurf had taken Craig and Deran out that afternoon, leaving the compound weirdly still. The house felt larger when there weren't younger kids tearing through it, their voices bouncing off the walls and the pool and the high ceilings. Andrew had been in the kitchen, making himself look busy by organizing the few things on the counter that didn't need organizing, when he'd looked out the window and seen you. You were sitting on the edge of the pool, your feet hanging into the water. You weren't moving, just staring down at the ripples your ankles made whenever you shifted. The late afternoon light sat on your hair, pulling out the color of your hair in uneven streaks, and even from the kitchen window, Andrew could see the line of your shoulders. Not tense, but also not relaxed. That particular stillness that meant you were somewhere else.

Somewhere not here.

He put the dish towel down and went outside without deciding to. The door to the patio clicked shut behind him, and the sound of it seemed too loud in the quiet.

He did not think about going over. His feet simply carried him there, across the patio, past the lounge chairs, until he was lowering himself onto the concrete beside you. He left enough space between you that you would not feel trapped, but close enough that you would know he was there. The water was cool against his legs, and he felt the shift of the afternoon heat on the back of his neck. He didn't speak. He wasn't sure what to say, and he had learned that for people like the two of you, silence was sometimes safer than words. He just sat there, his shoulder inches from yours, his gaze fixed on the same dark water, matching the rhythm of his breathing to yours. You didn't ask why he was there. You didn't even look at him at first, just continued to stare down at the water. Andrew could feel the tension in you without touching you, that low current of unease that never seemed to fully leave you. He wondered what you thought about in the quiet, and then decided he didn't want to know. Some thoughts were better left underwater. So he waited, letting the warmth of the concrete settle into his bones, letting the silence stretch until it felt less like distance and more like understanding. The compound was empty behind them, the house holding its breath in the absence of its children. But out here, with the pool shivering beneath your feet and the sky bleeding into early evening, it was just the two of you. Andrew let out a long, slow breath, and for the first time in days, the weight in his chest eased.

He belonged here in this moment, beside you, keeping watch. That was enough. For now, it was enough.

The water lapped against the sides of the pool, soft, rhythmic, and from the street beyond the fence, a car passed with a faint, distant hush. You didn't speak for a while, either. The quiet stretched out until it felt less like distance and more like the same stillness you'd shared through the bathroom door on all those nights. Then, without looking at him, her voice low, you asked if he hated you.

The question hit him somewhere under the ribs.

Andrew didn't answer right away. His jaw tightened, and his gaze stayed on the water, but his hands hung loose between his knees, no longer resting. The question turned over in his head, and for a second he couldn't figure out why it made his chest feel too tight. Hate was too simple. Hate was a clean, bright thing. What he felt for you was muddier than that, older, tangled up with Julia's empty room and Smurf's hands and the way you had looked at him that first week like he was just another threat you'd already learned to wait out.

Hate would have been easier.

"No," he said finally. His voice came out quieter than he'd meant. "I don't hate you."

He picked at the edge of his thumbnail, then made himself stop. The sun had softened into a deeper gold, and the shadows in the yard were stretching longer. He swallowed, then added, because you'd asked and because he didn't know how to lie to you, "I just didn't know what you were." He glanced at you then, not fully turning his head, just enough to take in the side of your face, the way you were still looking down at the water like it might have an answer for you. "Still don't, sometimes." The water swayed again, a faint reflection of the sky and the trees and the two of you sitting above it. The quiet came back, and this time he was the one who let it settle. Whatever you needed to say next, he'd wait for it the way he'd waited outside your door on the nights your breathing went wrong.

The break-in had torn something loose in the walls, a wrongness that settled into the grain of the wood and the still air of every hallway.

The clock on the nightstand read 3:04, its red digits pushing against the dark like a warning Andrew had stopped believing three nights ago. He hadn't been asleep. He'd been hovering in that narrow place between waking and memory, his back pressed against the headboard, his eyes on the black square of window that looked out over the pool. The shotgun lay across his thighs, heavy and warm from being handled too long, not because he expected anyone to come back but because the house had not stopped feeling like a wound since Sunday. For three nights, the house had not felt like his own. The broken window in the kitchen had been covered with plywood until the replacement pane arrived. Baz had walked around the yard with a flashlight and tightened the side gate twice. Smurf had gone through the lower drawers herself, setting things right with that flat, focused silence she wore when she was mapping violence, but Andrew could still smell the break-in beneath the sharp citrus of cleaning spray, the sour edge of strange sweat and damp clothing and old fear soaked into the hallway floor. He kept the window cracked an inch. The air off the pool carried chlorine and night jasmine and the faint salt film that settled over everything in Oceanside. He had cleaned the shotgun twice that evening, though it hadn't been fired, and the oil still sat in the grooves of his knuckles.

Sleep had become something he treated like an enemy, snatching only fragments of it in the chair by his bedroom window, fully dressed, the gun always within reach.

Every time his eyes closed, the same image rose behind his lids: {{User}} sprawled near the pool, your face bloody, one arm twisted beneath you, the shallow water glittering around your hair like it was trying to swallow you back down. His brain kept replaying the moment he had rounded the corner from the driveway and seen the house lit up but wrong, the front door hanging partly open and the thin sound of a car's engine fading somewhere far off. His heart had dropped so hard he felt it in his knees, and for a breath, for a moment that he still could not scrape out of himself, he had seen Julia lying there instead. That old ghost had sharpened your face for him, blurring the line between the sister he had lost and the girl he had recently learned to guard from a distance. Since then, the third night had become just another stretch of near-darkness, the clock on the nightstand reading a few minutes past three and the backyard turning silver where the pool caught the moon.

He was not waiting for sleep, exactly.

He was waiting for something worse.

The creak of the Jack-and-Jill bathroom door came soft and low, like a sound from a dream at first, but Andrew's body reacted before his mind caught up. His right hand closed around the shotgun's pump, thumb resting just beneath the trigger guard, and he turned his head toward the door with his jaw already locked. For a long second, he did not breathe. The door opened without hesitation, not fast enough to alarm him but not cautious either, and the yellow light from the bathroom cut a thin wedge across his bedroom floor. The gap of darkness shifted, and your silhouette stepped through, thin and pale as a crack in the wall. The light from the pool caught the edge of your jaw and the purpled bruise that had spread there since Sunday. You didn't flinch when you saw the gun, and that fact lodged itself somewhere in his chest like a splinter. It meant you had been expecting it. It meant you had heard him moving through the house every night, maybe from your own side of the wall, and you had known he was holding a weapon while you lay there pretending to sleep.

You just looked at him, and Andrew looked back, and neither of you spoke. His hand stayed on the gun, his pulse kicking hard beneath his ribs, but there was no threat in your shape, no tension he could read as danger.

That was almost worse.

The quiet in you was too complete, the kind of stillness that came after something had already broken inside. The thought made his stomach turn, not from anger but from the understanding that changed nothing—you had learned to accept danger in your bedroom the same way he had.

You moved with that same careful, near-soundless step you'd brought into the Cody house two years ago, the one that made him think you still expected someone to tell you were making too much noise, your bare feet crossing the room with a steadiness that felt practiced, like you had mapped the path in advance. He tracked you with his eyes, but he didn’t move. His index finger was not on the trigger, and he already knew the rhythm of your footsteps, had memorized it through the bathroom wall on too many sleepless nights. The fear did not leave him. It changed shape, loosened its teeth from his spine, and settled into a different kind of alertness. You reached the far side of his bed, the side that stayed cold and untouched, and lowered yourself onto the mattress without bothering to pull the sheet or the blanket over you. You curled away from him, knees drawn up toward your chest, one hand tucked beneath your cheek, your back rising and falling in a shallow, uneven rhythm he could barely see in the moonlit room.

Andrew watched the shape of you settle onto his bed, and some old, exhausted part of him understood exactly what you were doing. It wasn't about wanting comfort.

It was about not wanting to be alone in a room where the walls had become unreliable.

It was about proving to yourself that you could still choose where your body went, even if the choice was as small as which side of a bed to lie on. He did not move for a long time, his fingers still curled around the gun, his eyes on the curve of your shoulder. The house creaked once, some distant, ordinary shift of wood, and he forced himself to loosen his grip. Then he let out a breath he had been holding since the bathroom door opened, slow and thin, and looked away from you toward the window. The violence of Sunday kept rewinding behind his eyes: the splintered front door, the drawers dumped open, the kitchen chairs knocked over, and then the wet smear of your body near the pool, so still he'd thought he was looking at a corpse. He had gone down on the stone and his hands had shaken so badly he could barely find a pulse. For one blinding second, the face under the blood had been Julia's, and that second made his stomach churn. Now you were here, in his bed, on top of the covers, somewhere between refuge and escape. Andrew's hands ached from gripping. He uncurled them from the gun one finger at a time and set it on the nightstand with a quiet, careful click of metal against wood.

The red digits flipped to 3:09.

The pool light shimmered on the glass, rippling upward like the water was still moving long after the men had gone. He could not make the house safe by staring at it, and he could not unsee what had been done to you inside it. He listened to the quiet sound of your body shifting against his blanket. He could feel you there, not as a noise but as a shift in the room's weight. Your breathing was too shallow for sleep. It hitched every few seconds, like you were trying to keep it quiet, and the sound clawed at something raw in his chest. He remembered the nights he used to sit on the cold bathroom floor outside your door, listening for exactly this. He had thought he was invisible then, keeping guard from a distance because he didn't know how to do it up close. Now you had crossed the threshold yourself, and he still didn't know what to do with his hands or his voice. The version of him that Smurf had raised wanted to hunt down the men who had touched you had not stopped pacing since Sunday. It snarled behind his eyes every time he looked at the bruise along your jaw, every time he remembered the wet prints of their boots near the laundry room.

But here, in the dark, it was your breathing that held him, thin and uneven, and he let his own breathing slow, hoping you might hear it and match it.

The house settled around them, one long creak from the old beams, then nothing. Andrew stayed upright, watching the path of moonlight slide over the pool and the back window, his jaw tight enough to ache. He would not sleep. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt his eyes close without jerking awake, but he stayed there, still and wakeful, caught between the window and your back, a sentry beside the only person who had ever come looking for him in the middle of the night. The minutes stretched long and thin, and the room filled with that soft blue stillness that only existed at three in the morning. He wondered if you were cold. He thought about pulling the extra blanket over you, but his muscles didn't obey. If he moved, you might get up and leave. If he spoke, you might remember that you didn't ask for things. So he sat there, listening to you breathe, letting the night open around both of them, and did not let go of the world beyond the glass.

After a while, without turning back to look at you, Andrew, despite himself spoke, "I keep seeing you on the ground by the pool," he said.

Andrew pressed the balls of his hands against his eyes until he saw stars. "Every time I close my eyes. I can't make it stop," he muttered and swallowed, and his hands dropped, "I should've been here." They sat in the dark with that admission between them, and outside the window, the moon kept its pale eye on the water.

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