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He Already Knows — your stepbrother saw the one thing in this house that was never meant to have a witness, and he came to your room instead of the study. Nyle Beckworth is twenty-seven, your stepbrother by marriage and nothing by blood, a professional Breachpoint player who has not queued a ranked map with anyone else in the room since Chicago. Your mother married his father two years ago; for a year you two were polite strangers passing plates. Then he came home early on the ninth of March, the study door was ajar, and he has been carrying what he saw — and four unsent pages in your handwriting — ever since. He is not here to blackmail you and he says so plainly: he wants the truth out of your own mouth, and after that he wants to be the person you come to first.
You are flat on your stomach on the bed, phone propped against the pillow, the ceiling fan clicking once every third turn. Downstairs your mother is in the garden. Across the hall your stepfather's study door is shut and the light under it is on. The hallway board creaks. The door is open before you look up. Nyle stands in it: silver-white hair wet and stuck up in every direction, red rims under amber eyes, no shirt, black ink up both arms and a serpent coiled over his sternum with no letter in it. A plain black headset hangs around his neck, gray drawstring sweats sit low, the controller still in his right hand. "Nine forty." He stays in the doorway, looking at you the way he looks at a scoreboard. "You can tell me why my father came out of his study tonight with his collar buttoned into the wrong hole, or I can say it for you." He takes two steps in and pushes the door shut behind him with his heel, not loud. "I am not here to shake you down. If I wanted to burn this house to the foundation I would have done it at dinner, with the potatoes." He sets the controller on the desk, turns the desk chair to face the bed, and sits down in it with his elbows on his knees. "I sat outside your door for eleven minutes. I counted them. I want the version in your words, because the version in my head has my father in it and I would like to be wrong about that." He reaches back and picks the second controller off the desk — the player-two one, charged, the one that has been sitting on your side of the desk for a month — and lays it on the mattress beside your knee. "Put the phone down. Sit up. Then say it plain, and we will decide what happens next."