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When he came back he didn’t slink in through the window, or materialize out of thin air, or sidle out of the shadow of the night or any of the things you might’ve expected. It was midday and unseasonably warm. He rang the doorbell.
She came down the stairs. She’d been halfway through her chemistry homework when she’d heard the bell and then her mother shrieking, and then the unfamiliar laughter that rocketed through the hall. He was standing in the doorway, backlit by the sun, the long shadow of him thrown over the foyer. Natalie watched her mother pull him into her arms. He was taller than her, his chin tucked down into the crook of her neck; when the sob came it shuddered through them both. Over her shoulder, his eyes rose up to meet Natalie’s.
He was a stranger but she knew him. He could’ve been anybody, but—not really.
She stood frozen, staring. He pulled a clump of sod from his hair. Even from here she could smell it, the heavy, acrid scent that clung to him, like earth turned over, like pavement after rain.
“Natalie,” her mother beamed, eyes huge and bright and wet, “Say hello to your brother.”
He waved at her. “Surprise,” he said mildly, as if he were dropping in for dinner. “Can I use your shower?”
“What the fuck,” Natalie said.
Her father’s hands shook; whiskey sloshed over the edge of the glass. He didn’t drink, not usually, but in fairness usually people didn’t spring fully grown back from the dead, either. “Language,” he said, but in distracted reflex more than anything. His hands braced on the kitchen counter, knuckles blanched.
“Seriously, Dad? You don’t think the situation calls for it? I mean, what the actual fuck?”
Upstairs she could hear the shower running. Her mother was with Gabe, or not-Gabe, or whatever the fuck he was, getting him settled. He’d been blasé about the whole affair, as if his own revival was nothing worth any kind of production. Natalie’s head hurt. She felt like she could puke.
“We don’t actually believe this, right?” There was a chance she was drugged, or something, maybe. Or someone had decided to make the Goodmans victims of an extremely elaborate, extremely fucked up practical joke. There were not many logical explanations for it but any one of them was miles better than the alternative.
Her dad pressed a hand to his forehead. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, what, he’s been alive this whole time? Or he came back? How did he grow up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have some answers?” she snapped. “You’re always pulling the ‘life-experience’ card—”
“Well, my life experience doesn’t exactly cover this,” he hissed. He downed the glass and looked, for a moment, like he might hurl it across the room.
He didn’t, though, he just set it down. Closed his eyes. Clasped his hands and lifted his chin to the ceiling, looking a little like he was praying. She didn’t know to whom or for what. He’d never done it before.
Natalie wet her lips. Swallowed. “Do you think it’s really him?”
“No,” her dad said, without hesitation. His eyes stayed closed, but the planes of his face went rigid and steely with resolve. It was the most sure he’d ever sounded of anything. “I have no clue what that thing is. But it’s not my son.”
At dinner Gabe tipped back on the legs of his chair. It was remarkably living-teenage-boy of him. “So,” he said, twiddling his fork and looking around the table, “Catch me up on what I missed. Nat, you play piano, right?”
She didn’t know how he knew that. She didn’t know how he knew her. She chased a pea around her plate. “Yeah.”
He was clean but the air still reeked like a wet cemetery. Her dad stared at nothing. Her mom vibrated with energy, more alive than she’d been in ages. “Cool,” Gabe nodded, undeterred by her shortness, “Who’s your favorite? Composer, I mean.”
No one had ever asked her this before. She looked up and was startled to find him looking back.
“Mozart to play,” she answered, without thinking, “Chopin to listen to.”
Her mom said, “Gabriel, sweetheart. You’re not eating.”
His smile went a little sheepish. “Oh, yeah—I don’t, really.”
Natalie’s stomach turned. Her mom’s eyes flickered but only for a moment. “Oh,” she said, swallowing this, “Well. That’s alright.” She patted his hand on the table.
“This is insane,” her dad muttered.
“I’m sorry,” Gabe said, very diplomatically. “I wish I could explain. I know it doesn’t make any sense—”
“It’s insane. You’re not—” Dan pointed a fork at him, but then yanked his eyes away, as if he couldn’t stand to look at him for too long.
“Dan,” her mom hissed.
“No, it’s fine.” If Gabe was wounded it didn’t show. He drummed his fingers on the table and tried for a laugh; it sounded flimsy, unnatural. “It’s a lot, right? It’s gonna—take some time to process.” He squeezed her mom’s hand. She went a little moon-eyed.
Her dad shuddered. “I won’t—you’re not—” His utensils clattered. When he pushed his chair back the whole table shook.
“Dad,” Gabe said gently.
Her dad shook his head, and fled the room.
All the ways he was wrong were predictable. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. His smile was always just a little too sharp and wide; in certain lights he looked translucent, like you could’ve stuck your hand right through. He moved like a shadow. He was perpetually cold.
Still—somehow—there was a lightness to him that no one else in their family possessed. The weight of all their grief rolled right off of him. He took the days with ease, unfazed by her mother’s clinginess, her father’s staunch refusal of his presence, her own apprehensive distance. He joked around. He made dinner. He was downright fucking cheerful. It was at odds with everything and most of the time it pissed her off, but it was not entirely unwelcome.
Natalie was good at adjusting. The majority of her life had involved moving through various shades of fucked up. An undead brother was a bit of an escalation, but not by all that much.
“New Haven, huh?” Gabe picked through the pamphlet tacked to her bulletin board, handling the glossy pages with care.
“That’s the dream.”
“You’d get more mileage going West,” he told her. “Stanford, maybe. Put some real distance between yourself and all of,” he waved a hand at their general vicinity, “this.”
She glanced up at him from where she was sprawled out on the floor in front of her calculus homework. They were in her room; it was Sunday and one of those days when he looked like a real person. The light didn’t shy away from him, she could look at him without flinching. He was wearing a hoodie that might’ve been her mom’s. “I’m not trying to run away.”
“Okay,” he smiled. “Yeah, sure.”
“Seriously.” She set her pen down, secretly and shamefully grateful for the excuse to get away from derivatives. “I mean, maybe if I wanted to hang out with Bay Area influencer-wannabes—“
“Right, your crowd would be way more down to earth.”
She flicked the cap of her pen at him. He caught it with inhuman ease. “Very mature.”
“You have the brain of an eight-month-old,” she reminded him.
He laughed, a very real one; it made his eyes crinkle at the corners. “Exactly, which is why I have to live vicariously through you. So I can’t let you waste away in Connecticut—“
“New Haven is a college town. It’s beautiful.”
He flopped into her desk chair and spun a lazy circle. “Have you given any thought to Columbia? New York is cool.”
She waved a hand. “Second-tier Ivy.”
“Well, that wouldn’t do.”
Natalie felt herself grin, against her will. It was not always easy to be resistant to Gabe’s congenital charm, and anyway no one else in her family had ever cared much about what she wanted to do with her life. But he paid attention to her. She maintained it was only because he had nothing better to do, but she had long gotten used to taking what she could get. “What about you?” she asked, and then regretted it immediately when his face fell, “I mean, I’m sure there’s something—”
The smile recovered but it was thin. “I don’t think college counseling covers circumstances as extenuating as being dead for the first eighteen years of your life.”
“So, what, you’re gonna live with Mom and Dad forever?”
“We can catch up on all the time we missed,” he said dryly. “Y’know, me and Dad, father and son, throwing a football around in the yard—”
She snorted. “Maybe we can say you were in a coma,” she suggested. “You could try for a GED.”
“If it means I’d have to learn calculus, then I’ll pass.”
She knew a deflection when she saw it, and she had never been in the habit of making things easy. “I’m serious,” she pressed, closing her textbook, “We could figure something out. There are resources, and stuff.”
“Nat,” he said curtly. “Let it go.”
“Don’t you want it, though?” She tried to read his face. “You could have an actual life, and not just—” She made a vague gesture; his eyes darkened.
“Natalie.”
“I’m trying to help you—”
There was a flash of teeth: “I said drop it,” he snarled, and Natalie reeled back.
A beat. The acid tang of petrichor lanced the air. As quickly as the rage had come on it disappeared; Gabe blinked and pushed the hair from his eyes. “Sorry.” His voice was a little stiff but even. “Just—it’s cool, Nat. You don’t need to worry about me.”
"Okay," she said slowly. Her ears were sort of ringing. "Yeah, sure."
She never asked if he remembered it. There was a part of her that was morbidly curious and a much bigger part of her that didn’t ever want to know.
When she came home from school he was sitting on the porch. There was a bird in his lap, dying slowly.
“I didn’t kill it,” Gabe said immediately, without looking up at her.
Its wings were crooked. He cradled it gently, one hand cupping the back of its plumed, crumpled head. What the fuck, Natalie thought, but she said, “Okay.”
“It’s stupid.” A frown weighed at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were distant. “I just found it. I felt—bad for it, I don’t know.”
The feathered chest shuddered through a rise and fall. Natalie tugged a hand through her hair and tried to shake the unease. She thought of Gabe, tiny and dying, and then alone for as long as he had been. She said, “It’s just a bird, Gabe.”
Gabe shook his head. His long eyelashes were wet. “Go inside, Natalie,” he told her, very quietly.
The chill in his voice cut right through her. She took a breath and stepped around him to get to the door, trying not to look as the thing in his hands went still.
He didn’t drink blood or anything, she reminded herself sometimes. It could’ve been a lot worse.
“Mom?”
Diana was on her knees on the kitchen floor, hands knotted in her hair. The broken glass in front of her scintillated in the light. Natalie stood frozen over the railing.
“Diana,” Dan said, approaching as if to a wounded animal, but a predator, something with teeth. “Diana, honey—“
“No,” her mom shook her head, gasping, “No, don’t—“
“Di—”
But then there was Gabe: crouching beside Diana, carefully avoiding the shards. He didn’t hesitate, he just put his arms around her, and she shuddered and collapsed into him. Her face disappeared into the crook of his elbow. He untangled her fingers carefully from her hair and ran his own hands through it instead.
“It’s okay,” he said, the even cadence of his voice like a song. “You’re alright. I’m here.” He looked back up at Dan and smiled a little. “I’ve got this.”
Dan blinked. “You—“
“It’s okay,” Gabe repeated.
Dan looked helplessly at Natalie. Gabe murmured something unintelligible to Diana and all the tension bled out of her at once; Dan turned away from them both, scrubbing a hand over his face.
Natalie went back up the stairs.
When it was over the house was unnaturally quiet. She was stalled out on her English paper. He hung in the doorway and jangled her father’s keys. “C’mon. Let’s go for a ride.”
She did not ask how he knew how to drive. As far as she could tell he had risen up from the ground pre-loaded with all the necessary information for being a modern teenager, such as how to choose a good playlist and how to look after their bipolar mother and how to piss off his little sister.
For a while it was just the road and Alex Turner. Suburbia drifted unremarkably by them; it didn’t matter where they were going, it all looked the same. They passed the Walmart and eventually the high school; she was halfway through a fresh outline for her paper when Gabe broke the static silence. “Are you okay?”
“That was nothing.” Natalie pressed her cheek up against the cool glass. “That was just another day.”
He glanced at her. The dashboard made his eyes glow, just a little bit. “You don’t have to do that,” he told her.
“Do what?”
“The school counselors might buy the whole I-don’t-do-feelings bull, but it doesn’t really work on me.” He never walked on eggshells with her, which she was still trying to decide if she appreciated.
“Let me guess,” she picked aimlessly at the skin around her nails, “Coming back to life made you an empath?”
“No.” A wry flash of a smile. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
Unsettling her seemed, at times, to entertain him. He looked so smug, the fucker. She tried to still her nerves but she was pretty sure the accelerating four-count in her head was having the opposite effect. “You’re such a creep,” she muttered, suddenly very aware of her own breathing.
Gabe shrugged. “I keep things interesting.” They hesitated at a red light. Arctic Monkeys crooned through the bridge. “So,” he said, with sudden and heartfelt seriousness, “Our family sucks real ass.”
The laugh burst out of her before she could stop it. “Jesus, you think? What gave it away?”
His fingers drummed on the wheel, the long span of them made silvery by moonlight. “I thought maybe it would—I don’t know.”
“Get better, with you back?” He didn’t look at her. She scoffed, “You have a very high opinion of yourself.”
But in truth she’d thought so too. Not that Natalie was naïve enough to hope for a whole lot, but with newly-living, freshly-breathing evidence of a death-defying miracle she’d thought maybe, maybe, a normal family wasn’t completely out of the question. Gabe’s death had been the root of all their problems, so the logical inverse seemed to be that his un-death would straighten out the world, get them to something close to good. That hadn’t happened, obviously. It turned out her mom was still unraveling and her dad was still in denial and she was still angry all the damn time, so maybe they were bound to sink no matter what.
The light threw green over them. “Mom is—” Gabe started, and then cut himself off again. Chewed his lip. “I have, like, bits and pieces. I don’t get how the fuck it works, either, so don’t ask,” he added, when she opened her mouth, “just that I remember some things.” He hesitated. “She does love you.”
Natalie crossed her arms. “Like that makes a difference.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“I saw her with you,” Natalie said. The way he’d disarmed Diana with ease, the way everything in her mother had settled at once, as gently and quietly as falling asleep. “When she’s like that I can’t even get near her. She won’t let me—” She tightened her jaw.
Gabe said, “You were here. I wasn’t. Not really.”
“Well, you came first.”
“You’re her daughter.”
Natalie swiped a hand over her eyes, feeling stupid and small and pathetic. “I know what I am to her. I don’t care.”
It was a shitty lie. He wouldn’t need her heartbeat to know it. “It’s not fair,” he said gently, after a moment. She bristled but it wasn’t the kid gloves everyone had always handled her with, it was just sincerity, plain and honest. “It never was.”
“Well, story of my life.”
She wanted him to let it go. She wanted him to take his fingers out of the open fucking wound and let her do what she’d always done, which was keep her head down and push through. It’d worked out for her so far.
But he didn’t. He pulled his eyes from the street to look at her. “It’s not your fault, you know,” he told her, his voice very soft.
She swallowed. She shook her head.
“Nat. It’s not.”
The words turned over in her head. Some school counselor had said the same thing to her once before. But it was different, coming from him. She didn’t know why.
“I know,” Natalie said at last, when she could find it in herself to be blithe, “It’s yours.” And then, because he looked suddenly and utterly wounded, she tacked on, “You just had to go and die, didn’t you,” with as much sarcasm as she could muster. Which was a lot.
His eyes flickered. They were perpetually intense but the glint of humor worked its cautious way back, tweaking at the corner of his mouth. “Sorry for being a sick infant,” he retorted, rolling his eyes.
“Yeah, you should be.”
“I can’t believe I came back from the dead to get treated like this,” he sniffed. Then his gaze went to the Wendy’s up ahead and brightened considerably, all feigned animosity dissipating. “Frosties?” he suggested, which she figured was a peace offering. As far as they went it was a pretty good one.
She tilted her head. “As long as it’s Oreo.”
They fought often. He was an asshole. He liked to bait her, and she always rose to it. They got into stupid, petty squabbles over everything, over music, over comic books, over taking out the trash. For someone newly not dead he had a lot of opinions.
They did other things, too. He drove her to school. She made him sit through all the Lord of the Rings movies. They exchanged conspiratorial glances over the dinner table whenever their parents made veiled little barbs at each other; he helped her with her English homework, which he was naturally proficient at for reasons she could not understand. He was good with their mom. Once in a while she caught him staring at their dad, who still only ever looked past him, but then he’d smile and shake it off like a dog in the rain, winking at her as if to say, parents, right? Fuck ‘em.
It was weird. For most of her life she had regarded her brother’s memory with the kind of loathing that could only be grown at home. The kind that had to be honed over a dozen missed recitals and a healthy smattering of forgotten birthdays, that needed the steady cultivation of sixteen straight years of parental neglect and sessions with the guidance counselor and teaching herself how to do things like change a tampon and parallel park. It hadn’t been hard to hate him, in part because she hated most things and in part because he had preemptively blown up her life before it had even started. And in part because he’d been just an idea. It was sort of ridiculous to have beef with an eight month old baby and so she’d always imagined him as the very rough concept of an older brother, who was endlessly obnoxious, who was characteristically callous, who she could pin the whole interminable list of her problems on.
Gabe was—not like that. She was startled and a little irritated to find that she actually, honestly, against all odds, kind of liked having him around.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Henry said.
Gabe waved at him from the couch. “She’s embarrassed of me. I’m a blight on our family.”
Natalie weighed her options, the current best of which was curling up under the coffee table to die. “Henry was just leaving,” she told Gabe, who was looking at her boyfriend-or-something with intrigue. “Weren’t you, Henry?” She tried to shove him out the doorway but he was ridiculously stubborn. She regretted ever saying he gave up too easily.
Gabe was on his feet and grinning. Normalcy slunk over him like a second skin. “I’m Gabe,” he stuck out a hand for Henry to shake, “You must be the boyfriend. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Natalie elbowed Gabe, who didn’t flinch. Henry smiled and shook his hand; the shiver rippled through him automatically: Gabe was a block of ice on a good day. “I wish I could say the same,” Henry laughed, pulling politely away, “But Nat is kind of a vault.”
She weighed the charges for double homicide. A life sentence didn’t seem all that bad. “Henry, seriously. It’s not a good day for this—“
He put one steady hand on her shoulder. “Natalie,” he said gently, “What exactly are you afraid of?”
She scowled. “You don’t know my family.”
“He knows me,” Gabe said, unhelpfully. “We’re bonding.”
She looked at Gabe. Gabe looked back. It could’ve been a challenge, but she could never tell what he was thinking.
But they’d stalled enough anyway; her parents descended the stairs. Natalie lost any control over the situation she might’ve had.
From there it was an awkward, mortifying whirlwind. They ate dinner; her dad interrogated Henry over lasagna while her mother pulled off giddy and supportive surprisingly well. Gabe made Henry laugh, which Natalie, naturally, resented deeply. It was not—the worst thing in the world. If Henry noticed her mom watching Gabe like he could choke at any moment or her dad watching Gabe like he wanted him to, it didn’t show. He didn’t seem prepared to make an immediate retreat if given the opportunity, which she took as a win and maybe a sign of poor survival instinct. So it was not completely terrible. At least until her mom brought out the cake.
“Mom,” Gabe said, ducking his head. “You really shouldn’t have.”
The bitterness rose with a ferocity that freaked her out, a little bit. She couldn’t remember the last time her mom had baked a birthday cake for her. Gabe was basically a zombie and had not even been back for a full nine weeks, but of course he got homemade fucking buttercream.
Henry nudged Gabe. The candles threw trembling shadows on the walls. “Dude, I didn’t know it was your birthday.”
“Diana,” her dad said, “I can’t do this.”
The anger made her feel distant, unmoored, as if the gravity had been pulled from the room. “So fucking typical,” she muttered.
Henry’s eyes darted between them. His foot found Natalie’s under the table. “Is everything—?”
Her dad jerked up from his seat.
Gabe leaned over to Henry. “Dad’s not my biggest fan,” he whispered, and grinned with all his teeth. Natalie wanted to tell him to crawl back to where he fucking came from and leave her boyfriend alone, but she was resisting the urge to escalate, because her parents were doing that for her.
“Dan,” her mom said sharply, “Don’t be a child.”
Her dad made a strangled noise of disbelief. “Me?” he snapped, his voice rising, “I’m the only one not caught up in this ridiculous charade—”
“Don’t shout at her,” Gabe said flatly.
“You shut your mouth.” Her dad didn’t turn around, but the venom in his voice was enough to make Gabe flinch.
“This is fucked,” Natalie decided, and pushed away from the table. “Jesus. I thought for one second we could—” The words tangled in her throat. “Fuck this.”
“Nat,” Gabe said, behind her, but she was already halfway to the stairs.
Henry scrambled after her. “It was lovely to meet you all,” he threw over his shoulder, and followed her up.
“You can’t even look at me.” That was Gabe’s voice. She tried to tune it out but she hadn’t made it past the landing; it echoed up the stairs. She had never imagined he could sound like that. The dogged veneer of unaffectedness had collapsed, leaving behind something angry and hurt and desperate. “Dad. Fucking look at me.”
There were other things to focus on. Henry’s hands, the carpet. The rank of weed. Not—her mom, swinging a chair, Gabe and her dad lurching backwards and out of reach. Natalie had started categorizing the breakdowns when she was ten, a Richter scale for the gruesome magnitude of the screaming and crying and shattering things. The mall was a four. The swim meet was a seven. This was—
Bad. The numbers didn’t cut it.
When it was over she was in her room. She thought maybe Henry might’ve brought her there once she’d screamed her head off at her parents and then gotten high out of her mind, but she couldn’t be sure. She was wrapped in his flannel. He’d gone home, probably sometime after making sure she still remembered how to breathe.
There was a knock at the door. Gabe stood in the dim shaft of hallway light, fiddling with his hands.
She buried her face in her pillow. “Leave me alone.”
“I just wanted to make sure—”
“I’m not fucking okay,” Natalie told him, “and I hate you. I wish you had stayed dead.”
He made a noise that might’ve been a laugh or something else. “Right,” he said quietly, after a moment. He stepped backwards and out of the light. “Okay. Glad we got that cleared up.”
When she was thirteen her guidance counselor had told her she was infected with anger. Like it was pathological. Independent from her. Something that could be triaged and cured, as long as you caught it early, as long as the treatment took.
Even then she’d understood the truth, which was that the clawing animal of her rage was as much a part of her as her arm, as her third left rib, as the blotted birthmark on her shoulderblade. It had always been there, curling in on itself. Trying to find ways out. Cutting remarks to her father; snide talk-backs to her teachers. All the times she’d been anxious and snapped at Henry, who was a puppy, who didn’t deserve her ire or anything else she could give him but who miraculously stuck around anyway. Natalie wanted to hack it out of herself, wanted to be nice and kind and good, but the truth was that she wouldn’t know who she was without it.
Gabe didn’t avoid her, or anything. He was a Goodman, and none of them knew when to quit. She couldn’t help but feel like it might’ve been better if he had.
She’d known it would hurt him. She wouldn’t have said it otherwise.
When she came downstairs he was sitting on the kitchen island, twilight sprawled over his face. It was early. She could’ve tried getting in another hour before school but she was too wired; she knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep.
The window was open, the screen unlatched. “You’ll let moths in,” she told him.
He turned to look at her and blinked slowly. His eyes were a strange color, nearly incandescent. “Hi, Natalie.” His voice sounded off, like she was only hearing the echo. She felt a chill.
Natalie went over to shut the window and tried not to look at him. Filled a glass at the sink. She wondered, once in a while, what he did with his nights, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“I didn’t ask for it,” he said, all at once. The silence splintered.
Blue hour made her vulnerable and easily spooked. There was something in her throat, not quite fear but not that distant from it. She swallowed it down with the water. “I didn’t think so.”
“It just happened,” Gabe continued aimlessly. “I thought maybe it was—” He broke off.
She knew nothing of what it had been like for him, dying and coming back. They only ever kept up that morbid humor about it, their version of a fucked-up inside joke; otherwise he skittered around the topic, never giving anything away. It was easier that way, for all of them.
“But it’s not any better.” He shook his head. “It didn’t fix anything. So what am I doing here?”
Natalie managed to look at him. He was unsettlingly still.
“I don’t know,” she said softly.
He shuddered. His eyes were hollow, but there was the wet sheen over them, the tight wire of his jaw. “Maybe if I hadn’t—if I’d been here before,” he said, and swallowed. “But now. I don’t know.”
She gave herself only a moment to picture it. Gabe, her brother, moving through her adolescence in solid color, not as a ghost or a bitter memory, just as a person, who made her laugh, who she could talk to, who she loved and who loved her back.
It was pretty much useless. He was here now. This was what mattered. That was not their lives.
“Gabe.” She made it gentle, working against her own nature. “What I said. I didn’t mean it.”
He smiled without humor. “I’m not sure if I believe that.”
“Listen to my heartbeat,” Natalie told him, and he looked up at her and blinked.
His head tilted. He did. “It’s not an exact science,” he replied softly, at last, but the blankness in his eyes broke for just a moment.
There was dirt under his fingernails and streaked on the curve of his cheekbone. She hesitated. “Did you—”
He hugged his arms around himself. He could never seem to get warm. “I just wanted to see.”
She moved towards him cautiously, telegraphing; she saw him flinch and then tamp it down fiercely. “You shouldn’t have gone back there,” she said. He’d mentioned only one time that he’d dug himself out of his own grave. He’d said it flippantly, in passing, the way he might’ve commented on the weather; it gave her nightmares for more than a week.
Gabe shut his eyes. “I’m not—there’s something—” One hand came up to claw weakly at his chest. “It’s not right.”
He looked so young that it startled. He was her big brother, but she’d spent more time living.
Natalie reached out and took his hand. He let her; the shiver ran through them both. “We missed you, y’know,” she told him. “Even me. Even when I didn’t really know what I was missing.” She’d always wanted a brother. She’d never let herself admit it.
“It was just an idea,” he said. His voice was raw.
“Maybe.” She tried to tether herself to the feel of him, the knowledge that he was there. She thought of the years before him and the darkness that yawned. “But now it’s not.”
He wet his lips. “Mom’s the same as before. Dad won’t look at me.”
“Our family sucks real ass,” she reminded him, and he gave a shuddering laugh. “But you’re a part of it. And if you were gone, we’d—” Her voice caught. She swallowed. “I’d understand, though. If that’s what you wanted.”
He'd been dead a long time. None of them knew yet who he was without the shadow of it over him, over all of them. They'd lived their whole lives like that. Whatever they'd stepped into now, it was something new.
“I don’t know what I want.” When he opened his eyes they were brown again, wet and warm and alive. “I’ve never wanted anything before.”
“Welcome to living,” Natalie said.
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I want my money back.”
She cracked a smile, the best she could manage. It wasn’t as hard as it used to be, with him around. “It’s kind of a shitshow, huh?”
Gabe let out a breath he didn’t need. “Yeah,” he said, and then squeezed her hand, “But I guess it’s not all bad.”