Chapter 2 - Learning to Stay
Ellie cried the first night. And the second. A few nights after that, she woke up screaming for her brother before either Marcus or I could even get down the hallway.
Cole always got there first.
"I'm here," he'd murmur, sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark. "You're okay. I've got you."
He never once mentioned that Marcus and I were standing right there too. I noticed. I told myself it didn't sting, and I told myself that lie more than once.
Then one morning, Ellie woke up before Cole did. Instead of going to his room like she always had, she wandered into ours, climbed up between Marcus and me without asking permission from anybody, and fell right back asleep.
A few minutes later, Cole appeared in our doorway. He stopped the second he saw her curled up between us. For a long moment, he just stood there, saying nothing. Then, instead of calling her back to his room, he turned and walked away quietly.
Cole himself was much harder to reach.
He was polite. Almost painfully polite. He never asked for anything — not a snack, not a later bedtime, not a different show on TV. He ate whatever I put in front of him without complaint. He cleaned up after himself before I even finished setting the table. His bedroom stayed unnervingly neat.
It took me about a week to understand why.
He hadn't unpacked. His clothes were still folded inside two duffel bags. His books stayed zipped inside his backpack. His sneakers sat lined up beside his suitcase like he was staying at a motel and checking out in the morning.
"You know you can use the dresser," I told him one afternoon, trying to sound casual. "And the closet. Both are yours."
"Okay," he said.
He didn't move toward either one.
I wanted to ask him why. Something in his face stopped me — a kind of bracing, like he expected the question to turn into something else. So I let it go. But every few days, I'd glance into his room on my way past, and the bags were always exactly where they'd been.
Meanwhile, pieces of Cole started showing up everywhere else in the house. A basketball parked by the back door. His favorite cereal taking over a whole shelf in the pantry. His phone charger permanently claiming an outlet in the kitchen like it had squatter's rights.
Everywhere except his own room, he was slowly proving that he lived with us.
His room still looked like somewhere he might leave at a moment's notice.
A month in, Ellie started calling our house "home" without thinking twice about it. Cole stopped saying "sir" and "ma'am" to us, which felt like its own small miracle.
Then, one night at dinner, Marcus made an absolutely terrible pun about pasta — I don't even remember the joke, just that it was bad — and Cole laughed so hard milk came out of his nose. Ellie shrieked with laughter at the sight of it. I laughed until my stomach hurt.
For a few minutes, nobody was being careful. Nobody was watching everybody else's face for signs of trouble. Nobody seemed to be bracing for the night to fall apart.
Then Cole reached across the table and swiped a piece of garlic bread off Marcus's plate.
"Hey — get your own," Marcus said, smacking his hand away.
Cole grinned and took it anyway.
It was such a small, dumb thing. But watching him steal that bread, laughing while he did it, something in my chest tightened in the best possible way. For the first time since he'd moved in, Cole was acting like a kid who fully expected to be sitting at that exact table again tomorrow night.
I remember looking around at the three of them — Marcus wiping milk off the table, Ellie still giggling, Cole chewing stolen garlic bread with a satisfied smirk — and thinking, *this is what a family actually looks like.*
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I had no idea how quickly that feeling was about to get complicated.
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