YARA I don’t see much of Dean in the days after the dance.
He keeps to himself, out with Beau on some errand or another most mornings, and when we do cross paths at dinner, he’s careful, polite, distant in a way that feels deliberate, like a man putting a wall back up brick by brick after letting it fall for one reckless song.
That morning at breakfast, I hear his voice out in the hallway before I see him, low, unhurried, answering some question of Beau’s about fence lines, and my whole body goes still and listening before my mind has caught up to why.
I don’t even realize I’ve stopped buttering my toast until Nola asks if something’s wrong with it.
I tell myself it’s better this way.
I don’t believe myself very well.
My hands don’t believe it either.
They keep finding the edge of my sleeve, worrying the fabric between my fingers whenever his name comes up at the table.
It’s Rhett who finds me in the garden that Thursday evening, near the bench by the old sundial where I go when I want to be alone and usually am.
The evening’s still thick with heat, cicadas going full-throated in the hedges, the sweet, heavy smell of magnolia blossom hanging low over everything, and the old wood of the bench is rough under my palms where the paint’s worn away years ago.
He comes around the hedge slow, hands in his pockets, and there’s something in the careful way he approaches, like a man who’s rehearsed what he’s about to say and is still deciding whether he has the nerve for it.
Somewhere behind him, near the terrace doors, I catch a flash of gold hair disappearing around the side of the house, there and gone so fast I don’t think anything of it, just Yasmin heading out for one of her evening walks, the way she sometimes does when the house feels too small for her.
“Mind if I sit?” he asks, quiet.
“It’s your garden too,” I say, and shift over on the bench to make room.
We sit in easy quiet for a while, the kind Rhett and I have always been good at, the two of us having grown up in this house together like something closer to friends than the strange, formal distance Yasmin and I have always kept.
Rhett’s never made me feel like I was standing slightly out of focus.
He’s one of the only people in this family who hasn’t.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say something,” he says, low, looking out at the dark garden instead of at me.
“For a while now, actually.” “That sounds ominous,” I say, wary.
“It’s not.
I don’t think.” He laughs, short, nervous, and finally turns to look at me.
“Yara, I think I’m in love with you,” he says, the words dropping fast, like he’s been holding them back too long to slow down now.
I go very still.
My fingers curl against the wood of the bench.
“I’ve thought it for a long time,” he continues, faster now that the first words are out, as though a door he’d been holding shut has finally given way.
“Longer than I probably should have.
You’re the only person in this whole house who’s never once performed for me.
You just are who you are, all the time, even when it costs you something, and I don’t know anyone else brave enough to do that.” He reaches for my hand, careful, like he expects me to pull away.
“I know it’s strange.
We grew up together.
But I’ve never thought of you like a sister, not really, not since we were sixteen.” I don’t pull my hand back.
I don’t know what else to do with it.
“Rhett,” I say, gentle, because whatever else this is, it deserves gentleness, deserves better than being brushed off in the dark like it doesn’t matter.
“You’re one of the best people I know.” “That’s the part where you tell me you don’t feel the same,” he says, bracing.
“That’s not what I said,” I answer, quick.
He looks up at that, something careful and hopeful moving across his face, and I hate, in this moment, how easy it would be to let that hope stay lit.
Rhett is kind.
Rhett is steady, and honest, and has never once made me feel small in a house built on making me feel exactly that.
If I were the kind of person who chose safety, who chose what made sense on paper, I would choose him without hesitation.
But I’m not, and some part of me has known that since a stranger’s fingers brushed mine over a saltcellar and left something glowing on my skin that I still can’t explain.
“I don’t know what I feel,” I say, honest, because he deserves that much even if it isn’t the answer he wants.
“There’s a lot happening right now that I don’t understand yet.
About this family.
About myself.” I squeeze his hand once before I let it go.
“I don’t want to give you an answer just to be kind.
You deserve better than a lie I tell myself into believing.” He nods slowly, and I can see it costs him something, swallowing that disappointment down and putting a brave face over it, because that’s exactly the kind of person Rhett is, the kind who’ll bear his own hurt quietly rather than make someone else carry it too.
“Time,” he says, rueful, standing.
“I can do time.” He brushes off his trousers and presses a soft kiss to the top of my head before he goes, the kind of gesture that belongs to the boy who used to walk me home from the stables when we were children, not quite brotherly and not quite anything else either.
“Take whatever time you need,” he says, soft.
“I’m not going anywhere.” I watch him walk back toward the house, his shoulders a little lower than when he arrived, and I sit alone on the bench for a long moment after he’s gone, my thumb pressing circles into my own palm, wondering what it says about me that a good man’s love feels like something I have to apologize for not being ready to accept.
That’s when I notice the cicadas have gone quiet.
Yasmin stands in the shadow of the magnolias at the edge of the garden, still and silent, close enough that I understand, with a cold drop in my stomach, that she must have heard every word.
She isn’t smiling.
She isn’t performing anything at all, not the sisterly warmth, not the wounded innocence, none of the masks I’ve watched her wear a dozen times over.
Her face, half lit by the porch lights spilling out from the house, is doing something I’ve never seen it do in front of me before.
Calculating.
Sharp.
Her eyes move between the empty space where Rhett just stood and me sitting alone on the bench, cataloguing, measuring, like a woman who’s just been handed a weapon and is already deciding exactly how she means to use it.