I told myself, after the dinner with Law, that I'd back off. That whatever I'd been chasing that night had gotten close enough to the truth that I'd scared myself, and the responsible thing — the good sister thing — was to let it go before it became something I couldn't take back.
I didn't back off. I told myself a different story instead, one where wanting something harmless for myself didn't have to come at anyone else's expense, and went looking for the next opportunity instead of away from it.
Mom was easier than I expected. She'd been quietly uneasy since our first conversation about how fast Alex and Law had moved, and uneasy people are always looking for someone to agree with them. I didn't have to manufacture much — just enough small comments, dropped at the right moments, to keep her doubt simmering instead of letting it cool.
"Has Alex seemed stressed to you lately?" I asked her one Sunday, over coffee at her place. "Like he's performing happiness more than feeling it?"
"I hadn't noticed," she said slowly, "but now that you mention it..."
I let her fill in the rest herself. People always do, if you give them enough space and just enough suggestion. By the time we finished our coffee, she'd half-convinced herself that something was off in Alex's marriage, built almost entirely out of things I'd implied rather than anything I'd actually claimed to know.
I felt sick about it sometimes, late at night, lying awake running through the day's small cruelties. I loved my mother. I loved my brother. I told myself, every time, that this was the last time, that I'd stop once I'd gotten whatever I actually needed out of all this maneuvering — except I could never quite name what that was, which should have told me something important about how unwinnable the whole thing actually was.
The opportunity with Law came two weeks later, when Alex got called into an unexpected double shift at the club and Law offered to bring me dinner instead of leaving me to order in alone.
"You really don't have to keep doing this," I told him, when he showed up at my door with takeout from the place I'd mentioned once, weeks ago, in passing.
"I know," he said. "I want to."
We ate at my small kitchen table, conversation easier than it had been at the restaurant — safer ground, family updates, nothing pointed enough to make him guarded again. I waited until we were nearly finished before I made my move, the one I'd been planning since the moment he texted to say he was coming alone.
"Can I tell you something," I said, "that I haven't told Alex?"
"Of course," he said, and I watched the easy trust in his face, the same trust he extended to everyone he'd decided to care about, and hated myself a little for what I was about to do with it.
"I've never had anyone," I said, letting my voice catch in a way that wasn't entirely performance — some of it was real, the loneliest parts of it, even if I was using the truth as a weapon instead of just letting it exist. "Two years in a hospital bed. No dates, no romance, nothing. I watch you and Alex and I feel happy for him, genuinely, but I also feel like I missed my entire chance to ever have what he has. And I don't know how to say that to anyone without sounding pathetic."
"You're not pathetic," Law said, and I watched his expression soften the exact way I'd hoped it would, sympathy opening a door I had every intention of walking through. "You lost years you should have gotten to live. That's not pathetic. That's just unfair."
"Thank you for saying that," I said, and reached across the table to take his hand — a gesture that could have read as purely platonic, except I held it a beat too long, and looked at him a beat too long, and watched the exact moment he registered that something about the moment had shifted into territory neither of us should have been standing in.
He pulled his hand back gently, kindly, the way he did everything, and the rejection still landed like a physical blow despite how carefully he'd delivered it. "Karen," he said, quiet and careful, "I think I should go."
"I'm sorry," I said immediately, backpedaling exactly the way I had at the restaurant. "I didn't mean — I just meant it as a thank you. For listening."
He didn't argue the point, didn't accuse me of anything directly, just gathered his things and left with a gentleness that somehow hurt worse than anger would have. I sat alone in my kitchen afterward, replaying every second of it, equal parts mortified and furious — at myself, mostly, but increasingly, dangerously, at the unfairness of a world where Alex got everything and I got nothing, no matter how much of my life I'd already lost to things I never chose.
I told myself, again, that this was the last time. I almost believed it.
I had no idea, sitting there, how much closer that single rejected moment had just pushed me toward the version of myself I'd spend the rest of this story trying, and mostly failing, not to become.