Silent Half

CHAPTER FOUR: Three Brothers, One Home

The house had four bedrooms on the third floor that stayed permanently made up and permanently empty, and Alina had never quite decided if that was sad or simply practical. Her brothers had grown up in those rooms, then grown out of them the way people grow out of clothes — not because the rooms had failed them, but because the world had gotten bigger than a coastal town could hold, and each of them, in his own time, had gone to find the size of life that fit him.

She missed them in a way she rarely let herself examine too closely, because examining it too closely tended to end in tears, and tears felt like a luxury she couldn't always afford in a house where no one was around to notice them anyway.

Tonight was a video call night — the loose, unofficial arrangement the four of them had kept up for years now, though it happened less often than any of them liked to admit, schedules and time zones and the general erosion of everyday life pulling at the edges of it. Alina had learned to treasure the nights it actually happened rather than resent the nights it didn't.

She propped her tablet against a stack of books on her basement worktable — this was the one indulgence she allowed herself, letting her brothers see the room the rest of the house pretended didn't exist — and waited for the little chime that meant someone had joined.

Dante was first, as he almost always was, his face filling the screen too close, too bright, laughing at something before he'd even said hello.

"There she is." He grinned, and behind him she could make out the blur of a garage, tools hung in careful rows, the low hum of machinery she'd long since learned to recognize as home by proxy, since it was the sound of wherever Dante happened to be standing. "Still hiding in the dungeon?"

"It's not a dungeon."

"It's absolutely a dungeon, Ally. It's got a single light bulb and everything." But he said it fondly, the way he said most things, his voice carrying the particular warmth that had never once wavered in all the years she'd known him. Dante was twenty-four now, built for speed in every sense of the word — he'd been racing since he was old enough to convince their father it was a legitimate use of the family name, and had gotten good enough, fast enough, that no one argued with him about it anymore. He called twice a week, sometimes more, usually from somewhere loud, always with the specific energy of someone who refused to let anyone he loved feel forgotten.

"How's the shoulder?" she asked, because he'd mentioned an incident three races back that he'd downplayed so thoroughly she'd known immediately it was worse than he was letting on.

"Fine. Barely even remember it happened." Which meant, in Dante-language, that it still ached when it rained. She let it go. He'd tell her properly eventually, or he wouldn't, and either way she'd love him the same.

The chime sounded again, and Julian's face appeared in a smaller window, half his screen taken up by something that looked like a whiteboard covered in equations she couldn't begin to parse.

"Am I interrupting something important?" Julian asked, in the dry, careful way that was entirely his own — the scientist among them, twenty-six, precise in a manner that had nothing to do with coldness and everything to do with a mind that simply preferred order to chaos. He worked at a research institute two countries over, studying something to do with marine ecosystems that Alina understood in outline but not in detail, despite his patient, occasionally exasperated attempts to explain it to her over the years.

"You're interrupting Dante bragging about a shoulder injury he definitely isn't fine from," Alina said.

"I am fine—"

"He's fine," Julian said, deadpan, "the way he was fine about the wrist two years ago, which required a specialist and cost Papa a small fortune in overseas medical bills."

"Betrayed. In my own family."

Alina laughed — a real laugh, unguarded, the kind she almost never let herself have upstairs — and felt the particular warmth that only these calls seemed to produce settle into her chest. This was the version of family she actually believed in. Not the version at the dinner table, careful and performed and quietly unequal. This one, loud and teasing and entirely without hierarchy, where being the second-born twin meant nothing at all because none of them had ever once, in her whole life, treated her as anything less than exactly as important as anyone else in the conversation.

"Sebastian joining?" Julian asked, glancing at something off-screen — a clock, probably, Julian always tracked time zones the way other people tracked weather.

"He said he would." Alina checked her tablet. No new notification. "He's got the merger thing this week, so."

"The merger thing," Dante repeated, in a tone that suggested he found the entire concept of corporate mergers faintly ridiculous, which, coming from a man who spent his life driving in circles at dangerous speeds for a living, struck Alina as rich, though she loved him too much to say so out loud tonight.

They talked for another twenty minutes without Sebastian — Julian describing, with more patience than the subject probably deserved, some new coral survey his team had conducted; Dante recounting, with considerably less patience and considerably more enthusiasm, a near-collision at his last race that made Alina's stomach drop even in the retelling; Alina, when they turned the conversation to her, saying only that school was fine, that she'd started a new painting, deflecting anything deeper the way she'd learned to do so smoothly that neither of them ever quite caught her doing it.

It wasn't that she didn't trust them. It was that some things — the scolding at dinner two nights ago, the particular sting of watching her mother's hand smooth Amara's hair that morning — felt too small to burden them with from this far away, and too large to say out loud without her voice doing something she didn't want it to do on camera.

Sebastian's window finally blinked into existence just as Dante was in the middle of a story about a mechanic he'd nearly fired.

"Sorry, sorry." Sebastian looked, as he almost always looked these days, like a man who had slept in fragments rather than in one continuous stretch. He was twenty-eight, CEO of the family's shipping conglomerate for two years now, having taken the reins earlier than anyone expected when their father's health had wavered briefly and never quite recovered its old vigor. He carried the weight of it visibly, in the set of his shoulders, in the particular tiredness around his eyes that no amount of good lighting ever quite hid. "The board ran long. Again."

"You look terrible," Dante said, with the easy bluntness only a younger brother could get away with.

"Thank you, I love you too." But Sebastian's eyes found the small window with Alina in it, and something in his face softened, the tiredness receding just slightly. "Hey, Ally. How's the dungeon?"

"It's not a—" She stopped herself, laughing despite herself. "It's fine. I finished the sky on the new one. Dante said it looks like the day of the cancelled regatta."

"It does," Dante confirmed. "Eerily so."

"Send me a photo when it's done," Sebastian said. "I want to see it."

He always said this. He rarely, in practice, had time to look — his messages arrived at odd hours, brief, sincere, always a little rushed, the apology baked into the tone before he'd even finished typing it. But Alina had stopped holding it against him years ago. She understood, in the specific way you understand things about people you've loved your whole life, that Sebastian's love came out sideways these days, compressed by responsibility into smaller and smaller windows of expression, but no less real for the compression.

They talked for another half hour — Julian describing a dive site, Dante nearly getting into an argument with Julian over whether marine biology was "real science" or "glorified snorkeling" that made Alina laugh so hard she had to mute herself, Sebastian mostly quiet, mostly smiling, the exhaustion in his face easing bit by bit the longer the call went on, as though his brothers and sister were the only medicine that actually worked on him anymore.

Near the end, almost as an afterthought, Sebastian said: "I might be traveling more the next few months. Things are — the company's going through something. I'll try to still make these calls."

"You'd better," Alina said.

"I will." He looked at her again, steady, the particular way he'd looked at her since she was small enough to ride on his shoulders through the garden. "I promise, Ally."

She believed him. She always believed him. It would be much later, in a different kind of dark entirely, that she would understand just how much weight a promise like that could end up carrying, and how little control any of them actually had over whether it could be kept.

For now, though, it was just a Tuesday night in a basement that smelled faintly of turpentine, three brothers scattered across the globe, and a sister who felt — for one uncomplicated hour — entirely, unquestionably loved.