Silent Half

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Last Ordinary Conversation

Sebastian called two days before he was due to leave, later than he'd promised, but he called all the same, and Alina had learned, over the years, to weigh the fact of the call more heavily than the timing of it.

"I said I'd try before I left," he said, appearing on screen in what looked like his office at an hour that suggested he should have gone home long ago — tie loosened, sleeves rolled, a stack of folders visible at the edge of the frame that he'd clearly been working through when he'd decided, at last, to make good on his promise. "Cutting it close, I know."

"You're here. That's what counts."

"How's the painting?"

"Almost done. I'll send the photo before you land, I promise." She curled up on her bed, the tablet propped against a pillow, and felt the particular ease that only these calls with Sebastian ever produced — a specific mixture of comfort and gentle sorrow, comfort because he was, in his own tired way, entirely hers, sorrow because she could see, even through a screen, exactly how much this next trip was going to cost him.

"Tell me something good," he said, echoing, without knowing it, the exact request Dr. Reyes had made weeks earlier. "I've had a terrible week. I need something good before I get on a plane and have a worse one."

She thought for a moment, turning over the ordinary treasures of her recent days — Rosa's jam, Dante's laughter, Liam's small unprompted kindness with the book — and settled, in the end, on something simpler.

"Lolo Alaric told the story about meeting Lola Seraphine again this weekend. Same version. Same three jokes, in the same order."

Sebastian laughed, real and unguarded, the specific sound she'd been chasing. "He tells that story like it happened yesterday every single time."

"Lola pretends to be annoyed by it, but she still laughs at the same part every time too. The bit about the ruined suit."

"God, I love them." Something in Sebastian's face softened, the tiredness receding for the length of the memory. "I used to hide under that same veranda table when I was small, remember? Whenever Mama and Papa fought, I'd go there. Lola would find me and pretend she hadn't noticed I was upset, just start telling me some story instead, and by the end of it I'd have forgotten what I was even upset about."

"She does the same thing for me now."

"Good." He said it simply, sincerely. "I'm glad that hasn't changed, at least. Whatever else happens with this company, whatever mess I have to go clean up overseas — I like knowing that veranda's still standing exactly the way it always was, and that you've got somewhere like that to go."

They talked for a while longer about nothing that mattered and everything that did — a story from his own school days she'd never heard before, a memory of Dante at eight years old attempting to build a soapbox racer that had, predictably, fallen apart on its first and only run down the hill behind the house, Julian's earnest, exhaustive explanation, at the time, of exactly why the wheel alignment had failed, delivered with such seriousness that even six-year-old Alina had understood, somehow, that her second brother's mind worked differently than everyone else's, and beautifully so.

"I miss when we were all still here," Sebastian said, near the end, something wistful entering his voice. "The house feels different every time I think about it from a distance. Bigger. Emptier. I know that doesn't make sense, since there's still five of you living in it most of the time, but it does, somehow."

"I miss it too. Whatever it used to be." Alina hesitated, then added, carefully, "It's better with all of you in it. Even just on a screen."

"We'll all be back together properly, eventually. Once this merger's sorted, once Julian's project wraps, once Dante takes a break from nearly killing himself on a racetrack for five minutes." Sebastian smiled, tired but warm. "I want that, Ally. All of us in one room again. Properly. Not just calls."

"Me too."

"Soon," he said, with the specific, hopeful conviction of a man who genuinely believed it, who had no reason yet to know how wrong the timeline of that hope was about to become. "I promise you, soon."

She held onto that word the way she'd learned to hold onto all his promises — carefully, hopefully, without quite letting herself depend on it fully, because some old instinct in her had learned, across years of a father's absent attention and a mother's conditional warmth, that promises, even sincere ones, sometimes simply couldn't be kept, however much the person making them wanted otherwise.

"I should let you sleep," she said finally, noticing the particular heaviness settling deeper into his eyes. "You've got an early flight."

"Yeah." He rubbed his face again, and for a moment, just a moment, something in his expression looked almost young — the specific vulnerability of an oldest child who had taken on far more than he'd been ready for, far sooner than anyone should have had to. "Thank you for this. I needed it more than I realized."

"Anytime, Sebastian. Always."

"I love you, Ally. Take care of yourself while I'm gone. Whatever's going on with you lately — the tired thing you keep insisting is just school — take care of it. Please. For me."

"I will," she said, and meant it in the narrow way she always meant such promises now, the way that let her keep her secret intact while still, technically, honoring the sentiment behind his request.

"I'll call when I land, if the time zones allow it. And I want that painting the second it's finished."

"You'll have it."

He smiled once more, and the call ended, and Alina sat for a long while afterward in the quiet of her room, turning the conversation over the way she turned over all her good moments now, filing it carefully into the same private ledger — not knowing, not yet, that this ordinary, unremarkable exchange about veranda stories and soapbox racers and a promise to come home soon would be the last conversation she and Sebastian would ever have that wasn't shaped, entirely and irreversibly, by everything that was about to happen next.