Cade’s POV
Two days back and the house has developed a new geometry.
Sawyer enters rooms as I exit them. He showers when I’m downstairs. He eats when I’m at practice.
We share a bathroom and a wall and a last name and we haven’t occupied the same space for more than eleven seconds since the cabin. I’ve been counting.
It’s Tuesday morning. Linda made pancakes — the from-scratch kind, the batter-and-griddle performance she runs when she needs the kitchen to feel like proof that everything is fine.
The syrup is in the ceramic pitcher, not the bottle. The butter is on a dish, not in the wrapper. These are the details Linda deploys when she’s holding the family together with both hands and her fingernails are bleeding.
Dad scrolls his phone at the head of the table. He’s reading something about interest rates or market projections or whatever he reads to insulate himself from the emotional weather inside his own house.
I eat my pancakes and watch Sawyer.
He’s sitting across from me with his hood up — inside, at breakfast, which Linda hasn’t commented on yet but will.
He hasn’t touched his food. His fork rests on the edge of his plate at an angle that suggests he picked it up once and set it down and hasn’t found a reason to pick it up again.
He’s thinner. I noticed it yesterday when he came out of the bathroom in a T-shirt and his collarbones were sharper than they were a week ago.
He’s not eating. He’s not sleeping — I can hear him through the wall, the footsteps at 3 AM, the faucet running, the creak of his bed frame as he shifts and shifts and shifts without settling.
“Did you see gas prices?” Dad says it to no one in particular. “Up forty cents since October.”
“Mm.” Linda flips a pancake. Everyone here knows she doesn’t care about gas prices.
“Should’ve filled up yesterday.” Dad shakes his head at his screen. “Article here says it’ll be up by February. OPEC cutting production again.”
“That’s terrible, honey.”
“Sawyer, you drive what — a six-cylinder?” Dad looks across the table. The Richard Ellory School of Fatherhood: make the stepson feel seen by asking about his car’s engine displacement. “You must be feeling it at the pump.”
Sawyer stares at his untouched pancakes. “Yeah.”
“We could look into a campus parking pass. Might save you some trips if you’re not driving back and forth to—”
“Speaking of campus.” He puts his fork down. The metal taps the porcelain and the sound is small but the silence that follows it isn’t. Linda looks up from the stove. Dad’s thumb pauses on his screen. “I want to move into the dorms.”
Linda’s face crumbles in real time. It starts at her mouth — a loosening, the corners pulling down — then climbs to her eyes, which go wide and wet before the first word leaves her.
“What?”
“Next semester. I want to apply for campus housing.”
“Why?” She sets the spatula down. Her hands find the edge of the counter and hold it the way you hold onto something when the floor is moving. “Did something happen? Is this about school? Is someone—”
“I want the college experience.I want the college experience.” Sawyer’s voice is level and careful and it’s costing him everything to keep it that way. I can see the effort in his jaw. The muscle jumping under the skin like a heartbeat he can’t regulate. “Independence. Living with people my own age. It’s nothing personal.”
“It feels personal.” Her voice cracks. She’s not performing now — this is the real Linda, the one who cried in the shower after Dale and swore she’d hold whatever came next together with her bare hands. “Sawyer, we just got this family together. Richard and I have been trying so hard. We moved into this house for you boys. We—”
“I know, Mom.”
I set it down. The syrup is drying on the tines. I stare at it and my brain runs the diagnostic — what went wrong, where did the model fail, what variable did I miss?
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