Chapter 3 The Boy Who Is Just Fine

Declan's POV

I am not angry.

I just woke up at six in the morning to the sound of someone moving around in my house, as they live here. Footsteps in the hall. The bathroom tap is running. Cabinet doors are opening and closing in the kitchen. Little sounds that did not used to be there, in a house that used to be quiet in the mornings because it was just my dad and me, and we both understood that silence before eight was not rudeness, it was survival.

Now there are new sounds. And I am not angry about it.

I am just awake at six.

I pull on a shirt and go downstairs, and Lena Pruitt is already at the kitchen table. She has a bowl of cereal in front of her and a book open flat beside it, and she is reading while she eats, completely in her own world, like she has been doing this in this kitchen for years. My dad is at the counter making small talk about the neighborhood, and she is nodding and giving him one-word answers, and her eyes keep going back to the page.

I watch this from the doorway for exactly three seconds.

Then I walk to the coffee maker, pour a mug, and say nothing to anyone.

My dad looks over. "Morning, Dec."

"Morning."

He waits. Like, I am going to say something else. I drink my coffee and look at the window above the sink. Outside, the sky is doing that grey-pink thing it does before it decides what kind of day it wants to be.

Lena turns a page. She still has not looked up.

Here is the thing about that. Most people, when I walk into a room, look up. Not because I make them. Just because that is what happens. I do not think about it; it just does. Teachers look up. Girls in the hallway look up. Even people who do not like me look up, because ignoring someone is still paying attention to them.

Lena Pruitt is actually reading her book.

I drink the rest of my coffee faster than I should. It burns going down. Good.

"Declan." My dad's voice gets that careful tone. The one that means he wants something, and he is deciding how to ask for it. "I thought maybe you and Lena could ride to school together on Monday. Since you both"

"I leave early," I say.

"It is the weekend."

"I leave early on Mondays too."

My dad looks at me the way he has been looking at me for eight months. Like I am a problem he cannot figure out. Like if he just finds the right words, everything will go back to normal. There are no right words. Normal ended the day he sat me down and told me he was getting remarried, and I was supposed to be happy about it.

I set my mug in the sink and grab my keys off the counter.

"I will be back for dinner," I say. Which is more than I usually give him, and we both know it.

I am in the car and down the street before anyone can say anything else.

I drive with the music loud because loud music is the only thing that reliably shuts my brain up. I drive through the empty Saturday streets of this town I have lived in my whole life, and I do not think about the kitchen. I do not think about my dad's careful voice. I do not think about Lena Pruitt sitting at our table reading a book, as she belongs there.

I end up at the park near Westfield without planning to. I sit on the hood of my car and look at the empty football field and breathe.

This is the thing nobody knows about me. Everyone at Westfield thinks they know Declan Calloway. They know the version that shows up to school and runs the hallway like it is nothing, and gets invited to every party. They know the version that dated Rochelle Tate for six months and ended it without explanation, and moved on as if it did not cost anything.

Nobody knows about the box under my bed.

Nobody knows that my mother did not just leave. She left, and then she called me six weeks later from a different city and said she was sorry and that she loved me and that some people are not built for the life they accidentally build, and I was fifteen, and I sat on my bedroom floor and did not say a single word for the entire call because I did not trust what would come out.

Nobody knows I have called her number four times since then, and she has not picked up once.

My dad moved on in eight months. Eight months, and he found Sienna Pruitt and her daughter and their two suitcases, and now our house has new sounds in the morning.

And I am just fine.

I sit on the hood of my car until the sky finishes deciding and goes full grey. Then I drive back because I said I would be back for dinner, and I keep my word even when I do not want to.

The house is quiet when I get in. My dad's car is gone. I go upstairs and change, and I am heading back down when I pass Lena's room.

Her door is open a few inches.

I do not mean to look. I just do.

She is sitting cross-legged on her bed with her phone in her lap, and she is not on it. She is just sitting there staring at nothing. Her hands are in her lap, and her face is doing something I recognize immediately because I have felt it myself a hundred times and never let anyone see it.

She looks completely lost.

Not sad exactly. Not angry. Just, unmoored. Like someone cut the rope, and she is still trying to figure out which direction land is.

I stand in the hallway for a second too long.

Then I go downstairs.

I am making a sandwich in the kitchen when my phone buzzes. Rochelle. I look at the screen and let it go to voicemail like I always do now. Then I look at the message preview before it disappears.

It says: " We need to talk about your new stepsister. I found something you should see.

I set my phone down on the counter.

Rochelle Tate has been my problem for six months. She is the kind of person who collects information the way other people collect money, not because she needs it right now, but because she likes knowing she has it. When she says she found something, she means she was looking.

My jaw tightens.

Lena has been in this house for less than twenty-four hours.

What could Rochelle possibly already know?