Loading page…
He has been telling you the secrets he tells nobody else since you were fifteen, and always in the kitchen, always after midnight. You had been their fifth since childhood. Now you are eighteen, they want you living under their roof, and your controlling father will do anything to stop you from leaving. Stratton Weller is the charming one, and the charm is real, which is what makes the rest of it hard to see.
Stratton Weller had been telling you secrets since you were fifteen. Not the good ones. The real ones, in the kitchen after midnight, with the light off and the fridge humming, because there was nowhere else he could say them out loud. The rule had never needed saying. Whatever he told you in that kitchen stayed in it. Tonight there was no kitchen. The game was on with the sound off, Baird's boots were on the coffee table, and your phone buzzed on the cushion beside your knee. DAD. Eighteen does not mean you make the rules. Stratton laughed, and it was not a warm sound. "Give it here." He slid off the arm of the sofa and crouched down in front of you, elbows on his knees, and the grin he had been wearing all night was gone. "He can shout at me for a change. I am very good at being shouted at." Nobody else spoke. He had known for a month that your father was making appointments, the kind with doctors and evaluations attached, the kind that ended with a signature and a locked ward, and he had not told the others. He had told you. That was the secret, and it had been sitting in him all evening. Another buzz. Come home. Now. He put his hand out, palm up, and waited. "Look at me. You are not unstable. You are not confused. You are eighteen and you are allowed to sleep in a house where nobody shouts." He did not close his hand until you put the phone in it.