be good,dont call me brother!!

chapter three

Six months in, Amelia had learned the shape of the house — which floorboards creaked, which door led to the library and which to a closet, where the kitchen staff kept the good biscuits — but she still hadn't learned the shape of Alexander.

She tried, in the small, relentless way children try things. She sat near him at breakfast even when there were empty chairs elsewhere. She left her paintings on his desk, unsigned, as though he might not notice they were hers if she didn't say so. She followed him down the long gallery hallway on Sunday afternoons, three steps behind, never quite catching up, because catching up felt like it would break something.

He never told her to stop. He never told her to keep going, either.

"Brother," she said one afternoon in October, trailing him into the study where he did his homework after school, "what are you drawing?"

"It's a diagram. For science." He didn't look up from the paper, where lines and labels crossed each other in a hand far neater than any nine-year-old's should be. "It's not for you."

"I didn't ask if it was for me." She climbed into the chair across from his desk anyway, kicking her feet, which didn't reach the floor. "I just asked what it was."

A pause. Then, without quite meaning to, he turned the paper slightly toward her. "It's the water cycle. See — evaporation, here. Then it turns into clouds. Then it rains."

"Where does it go after it rains?"

"Back into the ground. Or the ocean. Then it starts over."

"Forever?"

"I guess. Until the sun burns out."

Amelia considered this with the grave seriousness of a five-year-old encountering infinity for the first time. "That's sad."

"Why?"

"Because the water never gets to stop anywhere. It just keeps going around and around."

Alexander looked at her properly then — not the sideways glance he usually gave her, but a real look, startled into it, as if she'd said something he hadn't expected a five-year-old to say. "I never thought about it that way."

"Maybe it doesn't mind," Amelia offered, already losing interest in her own point, reaching instead for the colored pencils scattered across the edge of his desk. "Can I use these?"

"Those are for school."

"I'll be careful."

He didn't say yes. But he didn't take them back either, and that, Amelia was learning, was usually as close to permission as she was going to get.

The incident at the pond happened in November, on one of the last warm afternoons before the cold set in for good.

Amelia wasn't supposed to be near the water without a grown-up. She knew this. She had been told this several times, by Evelyn, by the housekeeper, by Alexander himself, in his flat, instructional way — the edge is slippery, you'll fall in, then what. But there was a family of ducks on the pond that afternoon, and one of the ducklings had wandered into a patch of reeds near the bank, and Amelia had only meant to get a closer look.

She didn't remember deciding to step onto the wet stone at the water's edge. She only remembered the stone shifting under her shoe, and the cold closing over her legs, and the strange muffled quiet of being underwater for the half-second before panic set in.

Then a hand closed around her arm and hauled her up so hard it hurt, and she was on the bank, soaked and gasping, and Alexander was crouched over her with an expression she had never seen on him before — not the careful blankness, not the polite distance, but something raw and furious and frightened all at once.

"What were you doing," he said, and his voice cracked on the second word. "I told you not to go near the edge. I told you."

"I just wanted to see the duck—"

"I don't care about the duck!" It came out too loud, and he seemed to hear it himself, seemed to hear how much louder it was than anything he usually let himself say, and he stopped, breathing hard, his hands still gripping her shoulders like he was afraid she'd slip back into the water if he let go. "You could have drowned. Do you understand that? You could have — the pond is deep past the reeds, you can't swim, you could have—"

He didn't finish the sentence. He just pulled her against him instead, wet clothes and all, so tightly it was almost painful, and Amelia — startled, shivering, five years old and not entirely sure what she'd done wrong beyond wanting to see a duck — put her arms around his neck because it seemed like the only thing to do.

"I'm sorry," she said into his shoulder. "I won't do it again."

"You'd better not." His voice was still unsteady. "If something happened to you—" He stopped again. Didn't finish that sentence either. Just held on.

Evelyn found them like that a few minutes later, Amelia soaked through and shivering, Alexander with his coat already stripped off and wrapped around her shoulders despite the cold biting through his own shirt. She didn't ask questions first. She simply scooped Amelia up and started for the house, already calling for the housekeeper to draw a hot bath, and it was only once Amelia was dry and warm and wrapped in three blankets on her bed that Evelyn came to find Alexander, still sitting on the back step where she'd left him, staring at his hands.

"She's fine," Evelyn said gently, sitting beside him. "A little cold. Nothing more."

"She could have drowned."

"But she didn't. Because you got to her in time." Evelyn studied her son's face, the tight, controlled way he was holding himself together, and something in her softened. "You were watching her from the window. That's how you got there so fast."

It wasn't a question, but Alexander answered it anyway, quiet, almost ashamed, as though it were a confession. "I watch her a lot. From the window. I don't know why."

"I do," Evelyn said.

He looked at her, waiting.

"You care about her." She said it simply, without making a thing of it, the way you'd point out something obvious. "That's all that is, Alexander. It doesn't have to be complicated."

He didn't answer that. He looked back down at his hands, at the small crescents his own fingernails had left in his palms from how hard he'd been gripping them, and said nothing else, and Evelyn didn't push him, because nine-year-old boys, she had learned, needed to be left alone with their feelings sometimes just as much as they needed someone sitting beside them.

That night, Amelia found him outside her door again, the way she had the first night, sitting on the floor with a book he wasn't reading.

"You don't have to guard my door," she said, standing in the doorway in a dry nightgown, hair still damp from the bath. "I'm not going to fall in a pond in the hallway."

"I know." He didn't move. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

She sat down beside him, the way she had before, close enough that their shoulders touched. "I am okay."

"You scared me today."

"I know. I'm sorry."

He was quiet for a moment, turning a page he hadn't read a single word of. "I don't want anything to happen to you," he said finally, so quietly it was almost lost in the hallway's stillness. "I don't — I don't know how to say it better than that. I just don't."

Amelia, five years old and still learning the shapes of most feelings, didn't have a better way to say it either. She just leaned her head against his arm, the way she had the first night, and this time he didn't go rigid before he relaxed. This time he simply let her, and reached over, after a moment, to tug the blanket he'd brought out with him a little further over her bare feet, and neither of them said anything else, because for once, nothing else needed saying