Page 67 of Thin Ice

"Never." She said it once. Firm. Not angry. Just final. "This is family. You don't pay back family."

"But—"

"There's no but. You're here. You eat. You sleep. You have a key." She picked up her pie. "That's the end of it."

Liam was looking at me with the expression of a person who wanted me to hear what his mom had just said and actually believe it.

"Okay," I said.

"Good," Linda said.

"I do have something coming, though," Liam said. He said it casually. "For you. It just hasn't gotten here yet."

"You ordered something?" I said.

"Yeah. Takes a while. You'll get it before New Year's." He turned a page. "Don't worry about it."

I looked at him. He was lying. I could tell because his ears were slightly red. He didn't have anything ordered. He was going to figure it out between now and then, and he didn't want me to know he hadn't figured it out yet.

I loved him for it. For the lie, and the red ears, and the cute smile.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

Linda looked between us from her armchair. She knew too. She didn't say anything. She ate her pie.

The morning went on. More coffee. Linda started cleaning up the wrapping paper. Liam helped. I offered and she said "Sit" so I sat.

I held the key in my pocket. The metal was warm now from my hand. I rubbed my thumb across the teeth of it, back and forth, feeling each notch.

My phone sat in my other pocket like a stone. Tomorrow all of that would be real. Tomorrow the math would start and the questions would come, and I'd have to figure out how to go to school with no money and no family and no plan.

But right now, on this couch, in this house, with this key in my pocket and this pie on my plate, I was home.

Chapter 19: Liam

Two days after Christmas and the holiday was wearing off.

We'd been living inside a bubble. The dinner, the gifts, the pie, the three of us in the small house like the rest of the world had agreed to leave us alone. But the rest of the world hadn't agreed to anything. It was just December, and December was almost over.

We were lying in bed. Morning light coming through the window. Alex was on his back staring at the popcorn ceiling, and I was on my side facing him with my hand on his stomach, and I could feel his brain going. The rhythm of his breathing was wrong. Too even. Too controlled. The way Alex breathes when he's running numbers in his head and doesn't want anyone to know.

And I had my own math. Jerry expected me at nine. Every morning, nine o'clock, coveralls and a heat gun, and I hadn't told Alex the truth about it.

"Hey," I said. My thumb moved across his ribs. "How are you doing with everything?"

He didn't answer right away. His jaw worked.

"I don't know," he said.

"Talk to me."

"The bursar email said January fifteenth. That's two weeks. If I don't figure out tuition by January fifteenth, I can't register for spring. No registration, no enrollment. No enrollment, no rowing." He was talking to the ceiling, not to me. Listing. "The trust is frozen. My checking account is zero."

"Alex."

"The phone plan is his. That'll go off soon. Everything I thought was mine is actually his, and he just let me use it for twenty years."