The night my battered twin brother arrived at my

The night my battered twin brother arrived at my house with one eye, talking about his wife’s cartel relatives, secret ledgers, and a daughter caught in the middle, our fight over whether to trust the law or run became a life-and-death turning point

If you’ve never had your own face staring back at you from the wrong side of a peephole, you’re missing one of life’s strangest experiences.

If that face is half-covered in blood, one eye swollen shut and the other hidden behind a dirty bandage, it stops being strange and starts being something else entirely.

Terrifying.

The doorbell rang at 11:42 p.m.

Our house is in one of those quiet, older neighborhoods with big trees and small houses. At that hour, sound carries. I’d just settled on the couch with a beer and a documentary I was probably going to fall asleep to when the chime jolted my heart into my throat.

My first thought was: Wrong house.

My second was: Something’s wrong.

“Who is that?” Mia called from down the hall, voice muffled through the bedroom door. My wife keeps kindergarten-teacher hours; anything past ten p.m. is late for her.

“I’ll check,” I said, setting the bottle down.

I padded to the door, peered through the peephole.

For a second, my brain refused to process what it was seeing.

My own face.

Same dark hair, though his was longer and matted with sweat. Same jawline, same crooked nose from when we both broke it falling out of the same tree at eight.

But the details were wrong. One side of his face was purple and yellow, a bruise blooming from temple to cheekbone. The right eye was covered with a makeshift bandage, stained rusty brown. Dried blood streaked down to his jaw.

He looked like he’d lost a fight with a truck.

And he looked like me.

“Ethan?” I whispered, even though he couldn’t hear me.

His good eye found the peephole like he knew where it was.

“Aaron,” he rasped, voice muffled through the door. “It’s me. Open up.”

My fingers fumbled with the lock.

I swung the door open.

The porch light hit him, and for a heartbeat I saw him the way the neighbors would: a stranger in rough shape, swaying on his feet, clothes torn, face wrecked.

Then my brother stepped forward and collapsed against me, his full weight driving the air out of my lungs.

“Jesus—” I grabbed him under the arms, stumbling back. “Ethan. Hey. Hey. Stay with me.”

He smelled like sweat, road dust, and something metallic I didn’t want to identify.

“Aaron,” he mumbled into my shoulder. “Don’t… turn the light on.”

“What?” I asked, trying to maneuver him inside without dropping him. “We need to see—”

His fingers dug into my shirt.

“Please,” he said. “Just… inside. Door. Lock.”

There are certain tones your twin can use that bypass your rational brain.

I shut the door.

Locked it.

The entryway was dim, lit only by the TV glow from the living room.

“Who is it?” Mia asked again, closer now.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw her standing at the edge of the hallway, wearing my old college sweatshirt and a pair of pajama pants with cartoon avocados on them, hair in a messy bun.

Her eyes adjusted to the gloom and landed on Ethan slumped against me.

For a second, she froze.

Her mouth opened.

“I thought you were—” she started, then blinked. “Oh my God. Ethan?”

“Hey, Mia,” he said weakly. “Long time.”

She snapped into motion.

“I’ll get towels,” she said. “And the first aid kit. And… water. Don’t let him fall.”

“Not planning on it,” I grunted.

We half-carried, half-dragged him to the couch.

He sank into it with a groan.

In the better light of the living room, it was worse.

His right eye was gone.

Or at least, it no longer occupied the space behind the bandage, which sat sunken in a way that made my stomach flip.

I looked away, not because of how it looked, but because of what it meant.

Whoever had done that hadn’t just hit him.

They’d wanted to send a message.

“What happened?” I asked, voice too loud in my own ears. “Who did this to you?”

He laughed, a short, ugly sound.

“Got a few hours?” he asked. “It’s a long story.”

Mia came back with a bowl of warm water, towels, disinfectant, and the little first aid kit we keep in the hall closet for scraped knees and kitchen mishaps.

This was… above our pay grade.

“I should call 911,” she said. “You need a hospital.”

“No,” Ethan said sharply, reaching for her wrist. “No cops. No hospitals. Please.”

“Ethan—” I started.

He shook his head, winced.

“You call them,” he said, “and we won’t have to worry about hospitals. Or anything.”

My skin prickled.

“What do you mean?” Mia asked, voice wary.

He looked at me.

“You know Sofia’s family,” he said.

A cold knot tightened in my stomach.

I knew enough.

Not nearly enough, it turned out.

Growing up, the differences between Ethan and me were mostly about attitude.

We were identical twins in the mirror, fraternal in temperament.

I liked straight lines, clear rules, calculators. I became an engineer.

He liked chaos, risk, late nights. He became… whatever he needed to be at any given moment.

Drummer in a band for a few years.

Bartender after that.

Then, finally, a legit job in logistics for a shipping company.

That’s when he met Sofia.

He’d brought her to Thanksgiving four years ago, this bright, quick, warm woman with dark hair and a laugh that made my mom beam.

Her accent was soft, her jokes sharp.

“I like her,” Mia had whispered to me in the kitchen. “She’s good for him.”

“Anyone who can get him to show up on time in a button-down is a miracle worker,” I’d said.

They got married fast.

Too fast, if you asked my father, who believed any relationship under five years was “rushing it.”

“Some of us don’t need a warranty period,” Ethan had grumbled. “We just know.”

Sofia’s family didn’t come to the wedding.

“She’s complicated with them,” Ethan had said when I asked. “They’re… old school.”

“Old school” turned out to be a polite way of saying “connected to people you don’t want to owe favors to.”

Cartel-adjacent, Mia called it. Organized crime, my father called it. Dangerous, everyone agreed.

We kept our distance.

Ethan and Sofia moved to a different city.

He called less.

We texted.

Sent memes.

Shared pictures of Lucia when she was born—a perfect little girl with her mother’s eyes and Ethan’s smile.

Life moved on.

We swapped Christmas gifts and birthday calls.

I worried about him, in that general, twin-on-a-different-track way.

He always sounded tired.

There was always “work.”

I didn’t ask too many questions about the details.

Now, sitting bruised and half-blind on my couch, he looked ten years older than the last time I’d seen him in person.

“Start from the beginning,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady as Mia dabbed gently at the uninjured side of his face. “What happened to your eye? Where’s Sofia? Where’s Lucia?”

At her name, his throat tightened.

He closed his good eye for a second, took a shaky breath.

“That’s… why I’m here,” he said. “Because of Lucia.”

Mia’s hand paused.

“She’s okay?” she asked. “She’s safe?”

“That depends on what we do next,” he said quietly.

We didn’t call 911 that night.

Not because I didn’t want to.

Because Ethan looked at me with our shared face and spelled it out in a way that made my skin crawl.

“If they know I came to you,” he said, voice low, “they’ll come here. Not with warrants. Not with badges. With vans. With shovels.”

Mia flinched.

“We’re talking about… her family,” he said. “You know what they are, Aaron.”

He didn’t say the word.

He didn’t have to.

I knew.

I’d done just enough reading, watched just enough news to understand that these weren’t guys who sold a bit of something on a corner.

They were an organization.

Money, power, muscle.

And a long memory.

“You think they wouldn’t hesitate,” he continued, “to send someone to your nice little suburb, to this pretty little house, to make an example out of my brother, his wife, his neighbors?”

The picture flashed in my mind: headlights in the driveway, doors bursting open, men I didn’t know stepping into my living room.

I swallowed.

“What do they want from you?” I asked.

He laughed again, bitter this time.

“What don’t they?” he said. “They want the money they think I stole. They want the ledger they think I took. They want me dead so they can feel like they control the story.”

Mia and I exchanged a look.

“What?”, I asked. “Steal? Ledger?”

He leaned back, closed his eye.

“When I started working for that shipping company,” he said, “I thought I was just… loading boxes. Making sure things got where they needed to go on time. It was legit. At first.”

“At first,” I echoed.

He nodded.

“Then Sofia’s cousin showed up,” he said. “Friendly. Charismatic. He said their family had some… shipments that needed help. Bruised the right palms. Got me transferred to the port accounts.”

He swallowed.

“It was good money,” he said. “Stupid good. I knew I was helping move… things. I told myself I didn’t know exactly what. That if I didn’t ask, I could sleep.”

“You always were good at lying to yourself,” I said before I could stop it.

His jaw tightened.

“You think I don’t know that?” he snapped.

“And the argument became serious…”

The air thickened.

Mia’s eyes flicked between us.

“You always had to be the good twin, huh?” he said. “Mr. Straight-A, Mr. Engineer, Mr. Perfect Mortgage. Must be nice.”

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “This is about my niece. Keep talking.”

He snorted.

“Right,” he said. “Your niece. The one you barely visit.”

My fists clenched.

“The one I text on her birthday,” I said. “The one I send books to, because she likes to read and you forget to bring anything to family gatherings but your problems.”

Mia sucked in a breath.

“Guys,” she said softly. “Maybe… later?”

Ethan’s mouth twisted.

“Some things never change,” he muttered. “You being smug. Me being a screw-up.”

“Some screw-ups send you home with a black eye,” I said. “Some send you home with… this.”

I gestured vaguely to his bandage.

He flinched.

For a second, under the anger, I saw something else.

Fear.

Shame.

He exhaled slowly.

“You’re right,” he said. “Happy?”

“No,” I said.

We sat there, breathing hard, not looking at each other.

Mia, bless her patient teacher soul, cleared her throat.

“Let’s table the twin rivalry,” she said. “We can unpack that… in therapy later. Right now, I need to know: Who hurt you? And where is Lucia?”

He swallowed.

“The eye,” he said, voice softer, “was a warning. For me. For Sofia. For anyone who thinks they can cross her father.”

“Her father,” I repeated. “Not her cousin. Not some low-level. The… big guy.”

He nodded.

“Sofia’s dad runs things,” he said. “Not in the movies way. In the real-money way. Old connections. Politicians. Cops. If his name is on something, it happens. Or doesn’t.”

Mia wrapped a clean towel gently around his neck, careful not to jostle the bandage.

“When we got married,” he continued, “he wasn’t thrilled. He didn’t like that his daughter married an American nobody instead of some lawyer or banker in his circle. But he played nice for a while. Let me into some meetings. Let me see things.”

“Then?” I asked.

“Then I decided I didn’t want our kid growing up in that,” he said. “So I told Sofia I wanted out. I told her we could move. Witness protection. Something. She said we’d talk.”

He laughed, a short, broken sound.

“Turns out, she talked to her father instead,” he said. “And he decided to make an example out of me.”

My stomach lurched.

“Not Sofia,” Mia whispered. “She loves you.”

“She loves her family, too,” he said. “And where we come from, family wins.”

“Where you come from?” I said. “You’re from Ohio, same as me.”

He shrugged, winced.

“Emotionally, then,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

“What happened?” I asked.

He stared at the ceiling.

“They invited me to a ‘meeting,’” he said. “A ‘chance to clear the air.’ Usually that means a lecture. A threat. Maybe some shouting. This time…”

He swallowed.

“It started with words,” he said. “Then it didn’t. They wanted to know where I’d moved some numbers. A ledger. Digital. On a drive.”

“You took something,” I said.

He glared at me.

“I didn’t,” he insisted. “That’s the thing. I was going to. I had it. I was ready to take it to someone who could use it. And then I panicked. I thought, ‘If I take this, they’ll kill me.’ So I put it back. I walked away.”

“Except they thought you didn’t,” Mia said.

He nodded.

“They pulled me in anyway,” he said. “Accused me of playing both sides. Said they had ‘proof.’ I swear, I don’t know what they think they saw. But once they decided, that was it. In their world, perception is reality. They… made sure I wouldn’t forget it.”

His hand twitched toward his bandage.

My stomach clenched.

“I managed to get out,” he said. “Long story. Messy. Doesn’t matter right now. I ran. I got over the border. I got on a bus. I got here.”

“And Lucia?” I asked.

He closed his eye again.

“They have her,” he whispered.

The words dropped into the room like a stone.

Silence rippled out.

“What?” Mia said. “No. No. You wouldn’t— You didn’t leave her.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” he said, voice cracking. “She was at school. Sofia was—I don’t even know. They called me. They said, ‘We have your girl. You bring us the ledger, or we start sending pieces.’”

My head spun.

“So they think you still have it,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And I don’t. So whatever I do, I lose.”

“Not necessarily,” Mia said.

He stared at her like she’d spoken Esperanto.

“What?” he asked.

“You came here,” she said. “You’re here. That’s… something. We can call someone. The authorities. Our authorities. People who fight… that.”

“I told you,” he said. “No cops.”

“And I told you,” I snapped, “this is bigger than you now. Lucia is a U.S. citizen. She’s my niece. You show up on my porch half-blind and expect me to just… what? Charter a plane, fly down there, and what, negotiate personally? You think this is a movie?”

He flinched.

“I knew you’d say that,” he muttered.

“Because it’s true,” I said. “We’re out of our depth.”

“Like you’re so much deeper,” he shot back. “You install cameras in office parks. You put motion sensors on driveways. You’re not exactly Special Forces, Aaron.”

“Guys,” Mia said, firmer now. “Stop. Right now.”

We both shut up.

“I get that you’re scared,” she said, looking at Ethan. “You should be. I get that you’re angry,” she said, looking at me. “You should be. But the longer you two compete over who’s more right, the less time we have to do anything useful.”

She took a breath.

“Ethan,” she said. “Do you know anyone we can trust on that side? Anyone in law enforcement who isn’t bought? Anyone in Sofia’s family who might turn?”

He shook his head.

“Her uncle,” he said. “Maybe. He hates how her father runs things. Talks big about ‘change.’ But he’s still in the shadow.”

“Anyone this side?” she asked. “Who you can trust?”

He glanced at me.

“Aaron had a buddy in college,” he said reluctantly. “FBI. You did, didn’t you?”

I blinked.

“Jason,” I said.

We hadn’t talked in five years.

He’d gone into cybercrime work. I saw his name occasionally in articles about takedowns of international rings.

“We’re not… close,” I said.

“He doesn’t need to be your best friend,” Mia said. “He just needs to be someone who will pick up the phone and not hang up when you say ‘cartel.’”

I thought of Eva.

Of Lucia.

Of the men Ethan was running from.

My fingertips tingled.

“This is going to bring a storm down on us,” I said.

“It’s already here,” Mia said. “We can either stand in it alone or call for help.”

I met Ethan’s eye.

For once, he didn’t look defiant.

He looked like the scared little boy who’d once gotten his head stuck between the stair rails and cried while I went to get Mom.

“You were always the one who knew who to call,” he said. “Do it.”

I found Jason’s number buried in my contacts under “Jason FBI,” because apparently even Past Me had known I’d forget his last name.

The call rang twice.

“Special Agent McKay,” a voice answered.

“Jason,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Aaron?” he said. “Brooks? College Brooks?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry to call out of the blue. I… need help.”

“That’s rarely good,” he said. “You in trouble with the law or in trouble because of someone else breaking the law?”

“The second one,” I said. “My brother’s wife’s family. They’re connected to a criminal network across the border. They’ve taken my niece. My brother just showed up at my house missing an eye.”

Silence.

“You’re not kidding,” he said.

“I wish I were,” I said.

“You know I can’t just send a team across the border,” he said. “Jurisdiction is—”

“I know,” I said. “But you work with people who work with people who can. You know which channels aren’t corrupt. Which phones to ring. I’m… out of my depth.”

He exhaled.

“Where are you?” he asked.

I told him.

“Stay put,” he said. “Don’t call anyone else. I’ll be there in an hour.”

That night, my living room became a command post.

Jason arrived with one other agent, a woman named Lopez who had the kind of calm you only get from years of boiling chaos down into reports.

They listened.

They asked questions Ethan didn’t want to answer.

He answered anyway.

Sofia’s father.

His name.

His associates.

Routes.

Patterns.

“We’ve had eyes on them for a while,” Lopez said. “People like that leave trails. Money. Calls. We haven’t had a way in. Witnesses disappear. Evidence gets ‘misplaced.’”

“Lucky me,” Ethan muttered.

“Unlucky,” she said. “Lucky is when you don’t lose an eye first.”

He flinched.

Jason spread a map on the coffee table.

Red pins dotted a region south of the border.

“These are known or suspected properties controlled by her family,” he said. “Warehouses. Houses. Businesses. We can’t kick in doors without local participation. But we can… nudge. The right way.”

“Nudge?” I repeated.

“Apply pressure,” he said. “From both ends.”

He looked at Ethan.

“They think you took something valuable,” he said. “Even if you didn’t, that belief is leverage. We can use it.”

Ethan shook his head.

“I’m not walking back into that,” he said. “They’ll finish what they started. Or worse.”

“We’re not sending you alone,” Lopez said. “We’re not sending you without protection. And we’re not sending you without a plan.”

“A plan that doesn’t involve my niece being used as a bargaining chip,” Mia said.

Jason nodded.

“We don’t negotiate with people like that,” he said. “We dismantle them. Carefully.”

“Sounds like a government brochure,” Ethan said.

Jason shrugged.

“Sometimes the brochure’s right,” he said. “You have something a lot of informants don’t when they come to us: you showed up alive. You have family on this side. People who can keep you grounded. That matters.”

“What do you need from us?” I asked.

“Access,” he said. “Contacts. Names. Anything that can help us build a case strong enough that when we go to local law enforcement in that region, they can’t pretend not to see it.”

“And you’ll get Lucia?” Mia asked.

He met her gaze.

“We will do everything in our power,” he said. “I can’t promise it’ll be clean. Or fast. But we will not forget she’s at the center of this.”

Ethan swallowed.

“She’s ten,” he said. “She likes purple and drawing horses. She hates carrots. She still sleeps with the stuffed penguin Aaron got her when she was four.”

My throat tightened.

“I remember,” I said.

Jason nodded.

“Then let’s get to work,” he said.

The next weeks blurred.

There were calls at odd hours.

Encrypted messages.

Meetings in our living room and, later, in an unmarked office downtown.

Ethan gave them everything he knew.

Routes.

Drop points.

Nicknames.

The way Sofia’s father liked his coffee.

The way his men carried themselves when they were nervous.

They fed that into a larger machine.

Patterns emerged.

Accounts linked.

Calls mapped.

Someone on the other side—someone in a certain country’s organized crime division—finally had enough leverage, political cover, and external pressure to act.

It wasn’t one raid.

It was many.

Coordinated.

Some failed.

Most didn’t.

We followed from afar, through Jason’s tight-lipped updates.

“We got one of his key accountants,” he said one day. “That’s good.”

“We lost a tail on a convoy,” he said another. “That’s bad.”

“We found a safe house with children,” Lopez said on a Tuesday, voice rough. “Some of them… not hers. But we got them out.”

“Lucia?” I asked, every time.

“Not yet,” she said.

Every night, Mia and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, holding hands in the dark.

“I hate this,” she whispered. “Waiting. Knowing there are moves and countermoves and we just… sit.”

“If we weren’t sitting,” I said, “we’d be out there, in the line of fire.”

“I know,” she said. “I still hate it.”

I did too.

Ethan stayed with us.

He paced.

He drank too much coffee.

He woke from nightmares sweating, gasping, one hand clawing at the empty space where his eye used to be.

We didn’t talk about his reflection in the mirror.

We started talking, strangely enough, about everything else.

Fights from childhood we’d never resolved.

Old resentments.

The time I’d gotten a scholarship and he hadn’t.

The time he’d stayed up with me all night when our dad was in the hospital and I pretended not to need him.

We argued.

We apologized.

We laughed, once in a while.

“Remember when we used to pretend to be each other at school?” he said one afternoon, sitting at our kitchen table with an ice pack on his bandage.

“Mrs. Hart still thinks I’m the one who broke the overhead projector,” I said.

“You were better at being me than I was,” he said. “Always have been.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

He raised what was left of his eyebrow.

“You’re better at being you than you think,” I added.

He snorted.

“Now you sound like a poster,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said.

We both smiled, a little.

Then the call came.

It was 3:13 a.m.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Jason.

My heart flipped.

I answered.

“Yeah?”

“We found her,” he said.

For a second, I thought I’d misheard.

“What?” I asked.

“Lucia,” he said. “They found her. And Sofia.”

I sat up so fast Mia startled awake.

“Is she okay?” I asked. “Are they okay?”

“They’re alive,” he said. “A little banged up. Dehydrated. Shocked. But alive. They’re in custody down there, at a safe facility. We’re working on getting them out and up here as soon as we can.”

I covered the mouthpiece.

“Lucia,” I whispered to Mia. “They found her.”

She let out a sob of relief.

Ethan burst into the room, hair wild, T-shirt rumpled.

“You’re shouting,” he said. “Is it—”

“They found them,” I said. “Jason says they’re safe. Alive.”

Ethan’s knees buckled.

He grabbed the doorframe.

“Can I—” he started, voice cracking. “Can I talk to him?”

I held out the phone.

Jason walked us through what had happened.

A raid.

A safe house.

A standoff that ended when someone inside decided they were tired of following orders from a man now in handcuffs somewhere else.

They’d found Sofia and Lucia in a bedroom with boarded windows.

Sofia had been defiant, protective.

Lucia had been the one to spot the badge.

“She asked if we were real,” Jason said. “We said yes.”

“How long until they’re here?” Ethan asked.

“Days, not weeks,” Jason said. “There’s paperwork. Statements. They have to stabilize them. But soon.”

Ethan sank to the floor, back against the wall, phone pressed to his ear.

“Thank you,” he said. “I know you’re not supposed to… take sides. But thank you.”

Jason cleared his throat.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it feels good to remember why we do this.”

The reunion at the airport three days later was messy and loud and absolutely perfect.

Security and customs formalities blurred.

There was a small room.

A door.

Then Lucia barreled through it, dark hair flying, eyes wide.

“Dad!” she screamed.

Ethan stepped forward, arms open.

He caught her, lifting her off the ground, spinning despite his bad equilibrium.

She buried her face in his neck.

He cried openly, not caring who saw.

Sofia walked in a step behind, thinner, eyes shadowed, but on her feet.

She saw me and Mia, hesitated, then stepped into my hug when I offered it.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered in my ear. “For… all of it.”

“That’s for later,” I said. “Right now, I’m just glad you’re here.”

Lucia pulled back, wiping her nose.

She looked at Ethan’s bandage.

“What happened?” she asked. “To your eye?”

He smiled, watery.

“I lost it,” he said. “Long story. Remind me to tell you how cool an eye patch looks on Halloween.”

She giggled.

“Pirate Dad,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said.

She turned to me.

“Uncle Aaron,” she said, launching herself into my arms next.

I hugged her tight.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said. “I missed you.”

She pulled back, grinning.

“I drew you something on the plane,” she said, digging in her backpack. “It’s you and Dad. But I gave you both two eyes ’cause I didn’t want to draw… that.”

She gestured vaguely at Ethan’s bandage.

“That’s okay,” I said, throat tight. “Sometimes our hearts need a little time to catch up to our faces.”

She frowned.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“It will,” Mia said. “When you’re older.”

Lucia rolled her eyes.

“You adults always say that,” she said.

We laughed.

It felt… strange.

To laugh.

To breathe.

To not be counting seconds.

Nothing was magically fixed.

Sofia still had ties to people who would not be thrilled with her cooperation.

There were hearings.

Depositions.

Her father’s organization was weakened, not erased.

Some of his associates vanished before they could be arrested.

We moved Ethan, Sofia, and Lucia into a secure location for a while.

New names.

New routines.

New fear.

Maybe, eventually, new peace.

We went to therapy.

All of us.

Joint sessions.

Individual.

The kids drew pictures of nightmares.

We drew diagrams of feelings.

Ethan and I still fought sometimes.

We still dug at old wounds.

But now, we also sat in silence on my porch occasionally, watching Lucia and Eva draw chalk on the sidewalk.

“You ever think about how this could’ve gone?” he asked once, voice low.

“Every day,” I said.

“About how you almost didn’t call Jason,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. “I did call.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you thought about not.”

“So did you,” I said. “You thought about running. About burying this.”

He nodded.

“I’m glad we didn’t,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

We watched the girls.

Eva was showing Lucia how to make a hopscotch grid.

Lucia was insisting hers needed extra squares and a dragon.

“This is going to sound weird,” Ethan said.

“Most of what you say does,” I said.

He snorted.

“But I’m… grateful,” he said slowly. “For the argument.”

“What argument?” I asked.

“That night,” he said. “When I showed up. When we yelled. When you called me out. When I called you out. It… cracked something open. If we’d stayed polite, I might’ve talked myself into disappearing. Into thinking I could handle it alone.”

I thought about that.

About how close we’d come to writing this off as “Ethan’s mess.”

About how easy it is to keep your head down when danger feels far away.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes the fight is what gets you to the truth.”

He looked at me.

“We’re not done fighting,” he said.

“No,” I said. “But at least now, we’re on the same side.”

He smiled, small but real.

“About time,” he said.

People still ask if I’m afraid.

Of them.

Of the ones who got away.