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Danny laughs — a real one, the laugh I only ever get squeezed thin through a phone at half eleven his time — and the whole room can breathe, because Beau found the one door that opens in a moment like this, the practical one, the let me handle a thing I can actually handle one, and went straight through it.

“No,” Danny admits. “No, I have not.”

“Okay. The guys did a barbecue last night — there's enough left over to feed a platoon, no offense — let me heat you up a plate.” He's up. He stops at my shoulder, his hand light on the back of my neck, just for me. “You want anything, babe?”

“No. Thanks, though.”

“Okay.” And he goes, and he gives us exactly the kitchen doorway’s worth of distance — close enough to hear me if it goes sideways, far enough to leave me my brother.

Danny watches him the whole way out. Then he looks at me, and his face has gone soft and wrecked and proud all at once.

“Sloane.”

“Don’t.”

“He’s a good one.”

“I know.”

“No. Listen.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees, the way he used to lean in my doorway when he was reading the temperature of the house before he’d let me come down. “I have spent ten years on the phone every Wednesday quietly scared out of my mind that you’d decided people were just a thing that happens to you. And I show up and there’s a guy who won’t get off the couch, who you’ve told about me. Do you know what that is? Do you know what you’ve got?”

“I know what I’ve got,” I say, and it comes out smaller than I authorize, because I do, that’s the entire problem, I know exactly what I’ve got and I can hear the clock on it now, ever since a knock on a Sunday.

“Mom would —”

“Danny.”

“— I’m just saying. She’d have liked him.”

And he can say it, that’s the thing. He’s the only person alive who can set Mom down in a sentence near me and I don’t have to leave the room, because he’s the one I kept, and the one you keep is the only one you can stand to remember in front of.

“I’ll be in Haven a couple more days,” he says. “Tomorrow, Monday. I fly out of Boston Tuesday morning, go sort out the shit with Dad. So I’ve got two days, and I’d like to spend them looking at your actual face instead of the bad pixelated one. If that’s allowed.”

“Come for dinner tomorrow.”

“Sloane —”

“Not for any of this. Dinner. Here — the Sailmaker’s still gutted, so here.” I hear myself, fast, arranging it, because arranging is a thing I can do with my hands while the rest of me is underwater. “There are people I want you to meet. My roommates. Margo, June, Wren. They’re —” My throat does a thing I don’t permit. I shut it down. “They’re good ones too. Turns out I went and collected a few.”

Danny’s eyes go bright and he blinks it off “Yeah,” he says, rough. “Okay. Dinner. I’ll bring the bad wine I can afford.”

“You’ll bring nothing. You’ll let yourself be fed for once in your life.”

“There she is.” Soft. “Bossy. Just like —” and he catches it this time, because the back half of that is Mom, and even Danny knows which wires are live, and he lets it lie, and somehow the not-saying is warmer than the saying would’ve been.

“They’ll like you,” I say. “The girls. Margo will cross-examine your intentions toward the family by the time the salad’s out. June won’t let you leave the house hungry. Wren won’t say six words and she’ll still have you read by dessert.”

“So. Three more of you.”

“Warmer than me. Everyone’s warmer than me.”

“Nobody’s warmer than you, Sloanie. You just keep it in a lockbox.” Gentle, no edge on it. “Always did. You used to ration your Halloween candy clean into the next October. One piece a day, like a tiny banker.”

“It was a system.”

“It was a hostage situation. I watched you make a fun-size Snickers last until spring out of pure spite.”

“The spite was load-bearing.”