CHASE
I lasted forty-five minutes in my room.
Shower. Change. Fifteen minutes lying on my back staring at the ceiling fan. Ten minutes pretending to scroll through my phone. Five minutes arguing with myself.
Then I got up.
The house was quiet in the way it got after nine—Mom and Richard probably asleep.
Her light was on. The thin gold line under her door was the only brightness in the dark hallway.
I knocked once. Quiet. Deliberate.
A beat of silence.
“Yeah?”
I pushed the door open.
She was at her desk, laptop open, a half-empty mug of something that had probably been hot an hour ago sitting beside the keyboard. Her hair was down—loose, dark, spilling over one shoulder. She’d changed from whatever she’d been wearing when I came home into an oversized tee and those sleep shorts th
