The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 559

Chapter 559: 559 | The Rotisserie Chicken Schedule

The Fitzgerald estate looked exactly the way I remembered it, which was strange because I’d only left twelve days ago and it felt like a different lifetime. The gate rolled open on Diane’s approach. The driveway curved through the manicured grounds that Creston Hills demanded of anyone wealthy enough to live here. The house rose ahead of us in glass and stone, warm light spilling from windows that cost more than most people’s cars.

Home.

The word still felt borrowed in my mouth even after nine years, but it fit better than anything else did.

Diane parked in the garage and killed the engine. For a moment nobody moved. The three of us sat in the quiet hum of a car settling after a long drive, and I felt the specific weight of returning to a place that had almost stopped being an option for me.

I’d nearly died. I would never have seen this garage again. Sloane would have driven back here alone and walked through a front door that no longer had my hoodies hanging in the closet.

That thought sat heavier than it should have.

"Inside," Diane said. "Both of you. I made dinner before I left, which means it’s been sitting for two hours, which means it’s dry, which means we’re ordering something."

"You cooked?" Sloane said. "You never cook."

"I cook under specific emotional circumstances that I decline to discuss."

We went inside.

The kitchen smelled like something that had once been chicken and was now a memory of chicken. Diane took one look at it, made a face, and pulled out her phone to order Thai food from the place we all pretended not to be addicted to. Sloane dropped onto a barstool at the island and pulled me toward the one beside her, hand still locked around mine like she’d forgotten how to release it.

The bond hummed steady between us. Warm. Settled in a way it hadn’t been since before the Crucible. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

I let myself feel it. The kitchen tile under my shoes, the familiar smell of the house buried under scorched chicken, the weight of Sloane’s shoulder against mine. All the small ordinary details of a life I’d almost lost.

I was allowed to have this. That knowledge still surprised me every time it surfaced.

Dinner arrived twenty-three minutes later, and we ate at the island like a family that had spent the last two weeks pretending everything was normal. Diane told a story about Victor Sterling doing something catastrophic on social media. Sloane stole three of my spring rolls without asking and dared me to say something about it. I said nothing about it because I valued my continued existence.

It was good.

It was so painfully, unremarkably good that I almost missed the shift when it happened.

Sloane set down her chopsticks. She looked at me sideways, that particular calculating look she got when she’d decided something and was about to inform the room of the decision rather than propose it.

"Okay," she said. "So here’s how tonight goes."

I put down my own chopsticks. This was going to be a whole thing. I could feel it building through the bond, that specific frequency of Sloane preparing to say something she’d rehearsed.

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