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Cyrus notices because Cyrus notices what people try to bury. “Ash?”

I close my notebook.

Casper looks between me and Laurel. “What?”

“Ben’s sister,” I say.

Neither twin makes a joke.

Ruth is speaking now, asking Laurel if she needs anything, if the house is warm enough, if Lucy settled last night.

I don’t know who Lucy is but if she’s a Sterling too, then I might just scream.

It’s been too long since I’ve been in the same room as a Sterling.

“She’s fine,” Laurel says.

Ruth gives her a look. “That wasn’t the question.”

Laurel looks down at her plate. “She slept. Eventually.”

Lorna softens. “Poor baby.”

I stand before I’ve decided to.

Casper says nothing. Cyrus leans back. Henry watches me over the rim of his mug.

Crossing the café takes six seconds.

Long enough to remember Ben sitting on the hood of a car outside Last Mile, laughing with blood on his knuckles because Briggs had told him to duck, and he’d said, “I’m too pretty to duck.” Long enough to remember the funeral, to remember that none of us knew what to do with his family then.

Maybe we still don’t.

I stop beside Laurel’s booth.

She looks up at me. Hazel eyes. Piercing up close. Exhausted underneath.

“Laurel Sterling?”

Her expression closes by half an inch. “Yes.”

“My name’s Ashby Knox.”

Nothing.

That shouldn’t bother me. It does anyway.

“I was a friend of Ben’s.”

There.

A reaction.

Not much. A flicker. A breath she doesn’t quite take. Her fingers tighten around the coffee mug.

“Ben had a lot of friends,” she says.

“He did.”