“That’s impossible,” I say, white-knuckling my phone, set to speaker. Jane pats the couch next to her in the second lounge, but I can’t sit. I can’t move.

Farrow closes the door, taking a seat on top of the couch. Feet on the cushion, elbows to his thighs, he’s less nonchalant than what meets the eye. He keeps combing a hand through his hair, and his narrowed gaze keeps narrowing. Murderously.

Stalker on his mind.

I can’t even think about the most recent post. Not now.

“You have to understand, Maximoff,” Victoria Cordobi says in a stilted, manufactured voice like she’s reciting ingredients off a shampoo bottle. “You’ve been gone for three and a half months.”

“For an event that’s helping the company,” I say, almost too forceful. My tone is bordering hostile, anger pumping through me like gasoline and fire.

Victoria has been on the board of directors since H.M.C. Philanthropies was formed. She’s the one who was tasked with delivering the news to me.

I’ve been fired.

Fired.

I don’t understand how I go to bed as the CEO of a company I built from the ground up, and in one goddamn phone call, I learn that I’ve been pushed out. What’s eating at me, it’s not just about a hurt ego because someone stole my baby.

It’s more serious than that.

My family—the Hales, Meadows, and Cobalts—they all give a large portion of their amassed wealth to the philanthropy. Whoever is CEO has the greatest control.

Without me at the helm, I don’t know who the fuck is handling billions of dollars.

“Regardless of why,” Victoria says, “you’ve still been absent. And in your stead, Ernest has brought intelligent points to the philanthropy.”

My blood boils. “Ernest Mangold?” I drill a glare into my phone. As if I can reach this conniving prick. Honestly…I’m fucking whiplashed. I can’t make sense of this reality.

Ernest is pretty new. He came into the company only last year, and he’s been relatively quiet.

So what the fuck changed?

“Yes,” Victoria says, voice wooden. “The board feels as though Ernest Mangold is better suited to run H.M.C. Philanthropies.”

This can’t be real. “Victoria, if something’s wrong, if the board is in trouble and people have been coerced or blackmailed, I can help—”

“No,” she interjects. “We’ve been discussing this for months.”

I blink, the shock like a hard slap. “You’ve been thinking about this for months? And no one thought it’d be a good idea to tell me?” A thought punches me cold.

I zero in on Jane. Her brother, Charlie—he’s on this backstabbing board, and that means he’s known for months that they planned to kick me out. While on tour.

And he said nothing.

Jane shakes her head vigorously. “Moffy,” she whispers, “Charlie couldn’t have known.” But he’s opposed me too often to be so assured.

I have no time to whisper back.

Victoria replies, “With the time differences and your spontaneous tour schedule, it was difficult keeping in touch. You’ve been gone.”

If she says that again, I’m going to pop off like a 400-Fahrenheit firework. “I created this charity,” I say firmly. “I have a good relationship with the board. Why would you even consider pushing me out?”

It makes no fucking sense.

Victoria clears her throat. Like she doesn’t have a pre-written statement for that question. “I don’t feel comfortable talking to you alone about this. We’ll set up a meeting tomorrow and have the board talk over conference call.”

“No,” I say, not hesitating. “I’m flying in.”

Farrow straightens up in surprise. But when our gazes lock, he nods confidently. He’s with me, supporting me. If the board keeps harping on me being gone, then I need to be there. In person.

To fix this.

“That’s unnecessary,” she states.

“No,” I retort. “What’s unnecessary is the board voting me out behind my back. You will all show up, sit around the table, and look me in the fucking eye when you tell me you’re taking this company from me.” In one breath, I finish, “I’ll be there tomorrow. You’ll know when I arrive.”

I hang up.

And I storm out. Only looking for one person. I fling open the curtain to his bunk. “Charlie.”

He squints at the light and then glares at my scowl. “What?”

I open my mouth, about to say, how long have you known the board would vote me out? But I freeze, my vocal cords iced and immobile. My brain is telling me no, don’t go there. You’re wrong, Maximoff.

He’s my cousin. He’s family. He wouldn’t hurt me. Then I remember my parents and the rumor—how badly that hurt. But I also remember what my dad said. To protect each other, we sometimes react out of fear and love.

For Charlie to not tell me, it’d just be out of cruelty.

So he couldn’t have known about the board or the vote. I believe this.

I know this.

Because despite all the bad blood, I trust Charlie with H.M.C. Philanthropies and the wealth. It’s why he’s on the board. If an apocalypse happens, Charlie Keating Cobalt is the last safety net.

The one person who’d shut down any dissention.

And he’s been absent from the office, with me, for four months. An ambitious prick could’ve taken advantage of that.

“Moffy.” Charlie props himself on his elbow. “What’s going on?”

My muscles thaw. “The board just voted me out.”

His face falls before his yellow-green eyes pierce the wall. Shock, then anger—his reaction isn’t that far off from mine. “Who’s the new CEO?”

“Ernest Mangold.” I explain every damn thing that Victoria told me in less than a few minutes. “That’s all I know.”

“Son of a bitch.” Charlie climbs out of the bed in boxer-briefs, his golden-brown hair messy. He follows me into the first lounge. Jane and Farrow hang back, letting us deal with this mess.

I find a laptop and open it by the coffee pot. Still standing.

Charlie hovers close. “Ernest must’ve manipulated the board—and those fucking idiots fell for it.” He groans into his hands, then pushes his hair back. “People are so stupid.”

“He could’ve blackmailed them.” I’m still super-glued to this theory. I pop up flights out of the Denver airport. The tour bus will have to take a short detour, but my cousins will still make the Boulder FanCon in time.

Charlie watches me search for flights. “I should’ve left the tour weeks ago—”

“No.” I risk a short glance at him. “I’m glad you stayed. You surprised me.” I seriously thought he wouldn’t last the whole tour. I thought he’d quit on everyone and just leave. He proved me wrong. “I shouldn’t always think the fucking worst about you, Charlie. I’m sorry.”

He flinches at the sudden apology.

I let out a pained laugh. “And now I’m the first one to bail.” Sarcastic, I add, “Fifty points to Hufflepuff.”

Charlie slides the computer towards himself. My hands slip off the keyboard, and he uses the track-pad and pops up a new window.

He logs onto a site where we book private jets. “Don’t fly commercial. This’ll be faster.” Charlie angles the laptop towards me. He knows I prefer flying commercial, even though the paparazzi are like locusts at the airport. But private jets cost a lot, and they’re bad on fuel and the environment.

Charlie waits for an argument.

But he’s right. It’s faster, and it’ll help me reach Philly more inconspicuously. No media speculation or attention. So I fill out the flight box and I hesitate on the line: how many passengers?

My eyes flit to him. “You coming with me?”

He looks away in thought.

Even the idea of confronting the board without Charlie feels suffocating. He’ll be the only person I trust there. He’s the safety net.

I remember Harvard. How I felt the exact same back then. He was supposed to be the familiar face on campus, my one lifeline. Maybe I should’ve told him that. Maybe he has no clue what I felt.

Or maybe he still would’ve left me, no matter what.

But I can’t just let him go this time.

“Charlie.” I catch his gaze. “I need you to be there with me. I can’t…” I shake my head as the words lodge in my throat, afraid of saying the wrong fucking thing. I lick my lips. “I can’t do this alone.”

He doesn’t break eye contact. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

Charlie nods, assured. “Count me in.”

* * *

The private jet flies off the tarmac, and Farrow and Oscar seclude themselves in the front of the plane. Giving Charlie and me space. Or maybe forcing us to talk. Something we rarely do.

Unlike the twelve-person sleeper bus, there’s nowhere to hide. We can’t retreat to a bunk and ignore each other. My beige leather seat even faces his.

We’re on the same figurative side, fighting for the same purpose. But our past still wedges between us like a crater that we’ve never known how to fill.

Charlie drums his armrest and stares out the airplane window. I fold my paperback of Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, barely able to read with the tense silence.

And as soon as his eyes drift to me, I take a chance and start talking.

“Do you remember junior year? When we had to do that video together on The Iliad?” I ask, trying to be casual.

Charlie nods once.

“You played Apollo,” I say. “I was Achilles, and it was actually pretty damn good.” I smile at the memory and then grimace. “That is until our dads had to get the lawyers involved.”

They were afraid that students or teachers would publicly share the video and then the media would have a field day. Understandable since I was pretending to slay my classmates as Achilles. They thought that kind of negative press would hurt me.

Charlie doesn’t say a thing.

So I continue, “You remember how Faye Jones had such a crush on you? She kept insisting that you play Paris—”

“You don’t have to do this,” Charlie says, and he messes his already messy hair.

My palms sweat on my paperback. “Do what?”

“Bring up high school. The good ol’ times.” Charlie holds my gaze. “I realize there was a time when we were friends.”

“Yeah?” I tuck my paperback in the seat. “I remember us being close until that summer bash on the yacht. You know Harvard?” I inch towards the question. The one that I’ve never edged near. My tongue feels thick in my mouth. “You never really told me why you didn’t want to go.” I stop myself for a second.

I’m afraid.

And I don’t know what worries me. The actual answer or the aftermath of knowing it. My heart practically bangs against my ribcage.

I find some fucking words. “What changed?”

“Me,” he says without pause or extra thought.

My brows knit together and shock engulfs me. I’d always thought he’d blame me. “What do you mean?”

Charlie winces and sits up a bit more. Not slouching like usual. “You really want to talk about this? We’re on our way to deal with a manipulative motherfucker, who could be a narcissist or a sociopath, and if things don’t end well between you and me, we’ll be walking in with welts and bloody noses.”

I’d rather take the chance to do more damage than never try to repair what we broke. The hardest part was opening this door.

I’m not shutting it now.

“I don’t plan on punching you,” I tell him, “so that’s not going to happen.”

The corner of his mouth rises. “I never plan on hitting you either, but it still happens. You have a punchable face.”

“Thank you,” I say dryly.

His smile lifts more, but then morphs into a bitter cringe. “I wasn’t lying that day on the dock. When I said I couldn’t stand being around you, I meant it.”

A knife slowly sinks into my gut, but I listen. I wait. I don’t lash out. “Yeah?” I lick my lips, trying to form the right words. “So you bailed on Harvard because you didn’t want to be around me. That’s it?”

He lets out an exasperated breath. “You make it sound so simple. But it’s not like that to me.”

“Then explain it to me,” I plead.

He leans forward in his chair and then back, and I think he’s about to brush me off. But then he starts talking. Eyes on me. Not breaking. “I hate what I feel when I’m near you sometimes. I hate who I become.” Charlie rubs his mouth, then sits forward again. “We’re both living beneath the shadows of our fathers, but just imagine, for a second, what it’s like to live beneath yours.”

I go cold. It can’t be easy for him. I get that, and I want to help make it better.

But I don’t know how.

I inhale a sharp breath. “What is it like?”

Charlie shifts in his seat.

The topic is uncomfortable. The air is tight, and we’re passing a bomb back and forth. But for the first time, I feel like we have the tools to disable it.

He looks me right in the eye. “Fourth of July five years ago, my little sister burns her arm on a sparkler. She doesn’t go to my parents. Doesn’t even search for Jane. The first person she turns to is you.”

I want to cut in, to tell him that I was probably just near her in proximity, but he’s quickly spouting off to the next one.

“Halloween two years ago, Eliot crushes on the girl in that old local, corner bookstore. But I don’t learn this from him. My little brother chose to ask you for advice about approaching her, even though you and I both have the same amount of experience with girls.”

“Charlie—”

“Seven years ago,” he says, still going. “Winona falls into the creek behind the lake house, and she starts sinking in that quicksand mud. I’m halfway to her. Already ankle-deep in water, but you come out of God-knows where with your shining white armor and ten foot rope.”

His eyes are bloodshot, and he says, “It’s all these little moments that have made you. You mean everything to my siblings. To the Meadows girls, to your sisters and brother, and that makes you a shadow I can’t escape. Because I can’t be anything to them when you’re every fucking thing. So who am I?” Charlie points at his chest. “Who am I? And what the hell do I become if I go to Harvard with you? Lost and confused? I was already self-loathing and bitter, but I’d just be more resentful, more bitter—a guy who wakes up and hates himself for not being more like Maximoff Hale.”

What…

“You’re not self-loathing,” I argue.

At least, that’s what I’ve seen.

He tilts his head. “I don’t always lash out at you because I hate you. I lash out because I hate how I feel when I’m around you. I hate that I want to become you.”

I never knew this.

I never saw this or understood this. I think about everything all the goddamn time, but I never even fathomed that someone like Charlie, a Cobalt, could be less than confident, less than colossally self-assured.

Charlie shakes his head. “I’m not a natural born leader. I don’t want to be one, but sometimes it feels like that’s my only path to be someone or something to the people I love. Then maybe they’d need me like they need you.”

My eyes burn and stomach knots. “Charlie—”

“No,” he cuts me off again. “I don’t want to morph into someone else. I want to be me, whoever that person is, he’s not like you or anyone else, and I’m fighting to find him. You make that impossible sometimes.”

A rock lodges in my throat, an apology sitting on the edge of my tongue.

Charlie flips his phone in his hand. “And I’m not even blaming you. I needed to deal with these feelings, but I couldn’t be your sidekick or live in your shadow.”

Realization gradually sinks in. “Harvard…”

He takes a tight breath. “That night on the yacht, I decided right then that to escape your soul-sucking shadow, I’d have to escape you. No Harvard. No answering your calls or texts. You be you, and I…try to rediscover who I am.” His voice cracks.

He almost always lets me see his emotion. You think he’s brick-walled, but he’s not like his dad. He doesn’t contain a thing.

I thought ditching on Harvard was premeditated, but he said he decided to bail right then. In the moment.

I swallow, my heart beating fast. I want to reach out, but how do you extend a hand when you’re the cause of someone’s pain? “I can move out of the way for you,” I say. “I’ll try—”

“No. This is why I didn’t tell you back then. You can’t fix it, Moffy. Because I don’t want my siblings to lose you, and I don’t want to be you. There’s nothing you can do, and look at your face. I know it hurts…”

My chest constricts like I’m stuck beneath salt water and I can’t find the surface. My eyes try to well, and I tilt my head back against the chair. Bottling my emotion, face stoic. “Do you?” I ask since he’s always lacked a certain amount of empathy for other people.

“I can see that it hurts you,” he tells me. “You know, I used to believe that we were just meant to be opposites. That for all the compassion you had, I lacked. For all the responsibility Maximoff Hale acquired, I was left with none. And in everyone’s eyes, you were the hero, and I’d become the villain.” A tear rolls slowly down his cheek, dripping off his jaw.

It almost crushes my chest. “You’re not the villain to anyone,” I tell him strongly. “If anything, you’re the anti-hero. And people usually love those more.”

Charlie rubs another fallen tear. “I don’t need anyone to love me. I can deal with hate.”

I nod, just listening.

“But when everyone fawns over you and acts like you’re indestructible, it’s grating,” Charlie says. “I can’t bite my tongue, and my gut reaction is to go for your jugular.”

“I’m not any better,” I admit.

Charlie shrugs, and silence hangs but not as heavily as it could.

I want to stand. I want to do something more for him, but he keeps looking at me like, this is it. This is the end with no solution that I’ve asked to meet.

I drop my head, thinking. And thinking. “So are you saying I’ll always make you feel like shit?” It kills me knowing that I’ve hurt him for so many years.

And that I’ll just continue being a negative impact on his life.

“I can’t see the future,” Charlie says. “I’m not six-feet-three inches full of resentment anymore. I’m not sixteen. But it’s still tough being around you. Where everyone praises you. Where I’m stuck in a shadowed place and I’m neither lost nor found. Doing my own thing makes me feel…”

“Free,” I finish.

He nods. “Like my identity is mine. Not an extension of you or my dad.”

I understand the shackles of our parent’s past, but I had no idea I’d been shackling Charlie. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“I knew you’d care, but I also knew it wouldn’t change anything.”

“Right,” I mutter. I’m just supposed to…deal. I’m not sure the hurt will disappear that easily, but the truth is better than the unknown. I can finally see the kind of terrain I’m standing on. In case you were wondering, the ground is littered with rocks.

I just wish they were the kind we could shave down or move together.

“I think about something a lot,” I tell him. “How our dads are best friends. Our moms are sisters. In some cosmic way, I think you and I were fated to be rivals or friends.” I lick my dry lips. “I guess friends isn’t in the fucking cards for us, huh?” And I have to accept this.

“Non, il te suffit de m’attendre,” Charlie says in a perfect French lilt. No, you just need to wait for me.

“De quelle manière?” I breathe. In what way?

“To be strong enough to be near you and not hate everything about you and me.”

I’m fucking terrible at waiting around. Doing nothing. He knows this. You know this. But for Charlie, I’d try. If he needs me to be patient, I’ll do that a million times over.

I nod strongly. “Okay.”

We seem to breathe at the same time, and I try to relax and adjust the air conditioner.

Charlie reaches forward and steals my philosophy book. He slings his legs sideways across the seat and flips through the pages. When our gazes briefly meet, he says, “Merci pour le matériel de lecture.” Thanks for the reading material.