Silent Half

CHAPTER SEVEN: Amara's Design

Amara Jade Valerius had never, in her entire life, wanted for anything she'd actually had to fight for.

This was not arrogance so much as accurate observation, one she'd made peacefully with herself years ago and never revisited since: things simply came to her. Attention, affection, invitations, opportunities — they arrived the way weather arrives, unbidden, expected, unremarkable in their regularity. She had grown up entirely certain of her own gravity, the assumption that whatever she wanted would eventually orbit toward her, because it always had.

Which was precisely why Liam Sterling's continued, deliberate proximity to her sister had begun, over the preceding weeks, to needle at something in her she didn't especially enjoy examining too closely.

It wasn't that she wanted Liam. That was the part she would have found genuinely difficult to explain to anyone who asked, had anyone thought to ask, which no one ever did, because no one questioned Amara's motives any more than they questioned the tide. She had known Liam for two years — he ran in the outer edge of her circle, attentive in the low-grade, hopeful way of a boy who assumed, correctly, that Amara Valerius was worth being attentive toward on the off chance it paid off eventually. She had never encouraged it. She had also never entirely discouraged it, because discouragement required effort, and Liam's quiet devotion had simply been one more piece of ambient furniture in a life crowded with such furniture.

Until the swim meet. Until she'd looked up from her cousin's relay heat and found Liam — her Liam, in the loose, unclaimed sense that everyone at that school understood him to belong, eventually, probably, to her — sitting three rows up, in close and easy conversation with the one person in this world Amara had never once had to compete with for anything, because no one had ever put them in competition to begin with.

She had watched them for the length of an entire relay, something cold and unfamiliar tightening behind her ribs.

It wasn't jealousy over Liam specifically. She told herself this repeatedly, in the days that followed, with the particular conviction of someone building a case she needed badly to believe. It was something closer to disorientation — a fundamental wrongness in the order of things, the same feeling she imagined a person might get watching a piece of furniture rearrange itself without permission. Alina did not get looked at. That was simply a fact of their shared existence, as fixed and unremarkable as the color of the sky. Alina was the background against which Amara's foreground had always, effortlessly, made sense.

And now here was Liam, laughing at something Alina had said, holding out a second cup of orange soda like an offering, looking at her sister with an expression Amara recognized, uncomfortably, as the exact expression boys usually reserved for her.

She didn't act immediately. That wasn't Amara's style — she preferred, when she bothered to strategize at all, to let a plan arrive fully formed rather than force it, the same way she preferred to let opportunities come to her rather than chase them. So she watched, for three more weeks, as the thing between Liam and Alina deepened in the careful, secretive way her sister apparently imagined was invisible.

It wasn't invisible. Very little escaped Amara's notice when it concerned her own territory, however loosely she'd previously staked her claim to it. She noted the new lightness in Alina's step. She noted the phone Alina now kept angled protectively away from view at the dinner table. She noted, with a flicker of something she refused to name, that her sister had started, for the first time in years, to look faintly, quietly happy — the particular glow of someone who has found, without anyone's permission, a good thing entirely her own.

That, more than anything, was what decided her.

She found Liam alone outside the library one afternoon, waited until his friends peeled off toward their next class, and fell into step beside him with the easy confidence of a girl who had never once doubted her welcome anywhere.

"Walk with me," she said, and it wasn't a question.

He walked with her. Of course he did.

"You've been spending time with my sister," she said, once they'd rounded the corner out of earshot of anyone who mattered.

Something shifted in his face — a flicker of guilt, quickly smoothed over, the particular defensive stiffness of a boy caught doing something he suspected, correctly, he shouldn't have been doing. "We're friends."

"Are you." She let the silence sit a beat longer than was comfortable, watching him not quite meet her eyes. "That's interesting, Liam, because I don't remember you ever once, in two years, going out of your way to be friends with someone who wasn't already in my circle."

He didn't answer that. She hadn't expected him to.

"Here's what I think," Amara said, and her voice, when she wanted it to, could carry the particular calm of someone who has never once needed to raise it to get her way. "I think you like the idea of being close to this family. I think you've liked it for a while. And I think you've found, quite by accident, a much easier way in than the one you'd been trying before."

"That's not—"

"I'm not angry," she said, which was, in its own way, almost true — the thing she felt wasn't precisely anger, though it shared anger's temperature. "I think it's actually useful, that you've gotten close to her. She doesn't have many people who pay her that kind of attention. It would be a shame for that attention to just — evaporate, one day, wouldn't it? After she's let herself get used to it."

He looked at her properly then, something wary sharpening behind his eyes, beginning, however dimly, to understand the shape of what was being proposed to him before she'd finished proposing it.

"I want you to stay close to her," Amara said. "For a while. Let her think it's real — because to you it should feel real enough, she's sweet, I'm sure it isn't hard. And then, when the time is right, when she's let it matter to her the way I think she's already starting to — you end it. Cleanly. However you like. I don't especially care about the details."

"Why?"

It was the only question he asked, and it was, Amara noted with some private satisfaction, exactly the right one — not a refusal, not even hesitation dressed up as principle, just a genuine, practical inquiry into her reasoning, the question of a boy already calculating what compliance might cost him and what it might earn him in return.

She considered several answers, all of them partially true, and settled on the simplest.

"Because she doesn't get to have something I haven't touched," Amara said, and heard, distantly, how it sounded out loud, and did not, even so, take it back. "Everything in this family finds its way back to me eventually, Liam. It always has. I'd just rather it happen on my terms than by accident."

He was quiet for a long moment, and she watched him do the arithmetic she'd known he would eventually do — weigh whatever small, inconvenient guilt he might feel against the considerably larger, considerably more permanent benefit of remaining, however tenuously, inside Amara Valerius's good favor.

"Okay," he said finally.

"Good." She smiled, the same smile that had gotten her everything else in her life without resistance. "Don't rush it. Let her fall properly first. It only matters if it actually costs her something."

She left him standing outside the library with that instruction settling over him like a held breath, and did not think of Alina again for the rest of the day — did not think of the basement room, or the paintings, or the particular, hard-won lightness that had recently begun to show up in her sister's step for the first time in years.

She would think of it later. Not with guilt, not exactly — guilt required a kind of imagination Amara had never had much use for — but with something closer to inconvenience, the way a person thinks of an old decision that has begun, unexpectedly, to cost more than it was supposed to.

For now, it was simply a piece of order restored. The world, rearranged back into its proper shape, with Amara once again at its center, and her sister's small, private happiness quietly repossessed before it had a chance to become something Amara couldn't, eventually, take back.