Dayton opens the door after a single knock, wearing boxers and a t-shirt. He doesn’t have his leg on. He must have taken the stairs three at a time on one foot to get here before I knocked a second time.

“Hey.” He says it as casually as a person can when they’re balanced against a doorframe, running a hand through sleep-disheveled hair.

“I woke you up.” The guilt balled tightly in the center of my chest is covered in a thick layer of not giving a fuck and giving entirely too many fucks.

“Yeah, and I’m already down here, so don’t give me that ‘aww shucks’ bullshit and walk away.” He doesn’t ask me what I need. He backs up a step and gestures me inside, then shuts the door gently behind us. “Did you get kicked out of your hotel?”

“How’d you know about the hotel?” It’s one in the morning, and I’ve been fighting off racing thoughts all night. What the hell did I miss?

“Your sister, named Summer.” Dayton’s voice is gravelly with sleep and the guilt rises again. Not enough to make me leave, but it’s there, always there, just like that fucking Humvee. “She has a certain level of friendship with—”

“I never told her I was staying in a hotel.”

“Hotel, hostel, somewhere else. You’re picky as hell about roommates. Everybody knows that.”

“Wes? Are you okay?”

Summer comes down the stairs in bare feet, a soft outfit setting off her hair, which falls loosely around her face.

“You don’t have to be up for this.”

“The hell I don’t.” She steps to Day’s side and wraps her arm around his waist like it’s the easiest thing she’s ever done. “You’re practically naked.”

He looks down at himself. “You’re right. I’m not dressed for the occasion. Be right back.”

Dayton goes for the stairs and Summer looks at me across the entry hall. “You want a beer?”

“You really don’t have to—”

“I’ll take that as a yes. And keep your voice down. January did not want to go to sleep at bedtime.”

I follow Summer into the kitchen. She grabs three beers from the fridge and motions me out onto the back patio. Their backyard isn’t huge, but it’s got honest-to-God grass, and it’s all theirs. I don’t know how they lucked into this place.

Sunny sets the beers on a little wicker table and bends over a little firepit in the center of the patio. Her hand works at a switch and it blazes to life, the flames cheerful in the metal sculpted basin.

“Nice, right?” Her face looks oddly proud in the firelight. “I thought it was stupid, but Day wanted it. Turns out he was right.”

She goes back to the table and hands me one of the beers. “What’s up, Wes? Can’t sleep?”

I crack a grin. We used to run into each other in the middle of the night, two teenage ghosts in the hallways of our parents’ house. It was easier to talk to her then, in the dark, because there was no front to keep up.

“No. Haven’t slept.”

Sunny sits in one of the patio chairs and tucks her feet beneath her. It’s warm enough not to need a blanket. I’ve just let my ass hit the wicker when Dayton comes out and takes the third beer, falling into a seat next to Summer.

Now it feels awkward.

I’ve hauled them out of bed in the middle of the night like a lovesick asshole.

Dayton opens his beer and takes a long drink. “You know,” he says thoughtfully, tilting his head back to look at the orange city sky, “if you wanted a night out of that fucking hotel, you could have come here earlier.”

I rub my free hand over my face. “I worked late. It...wasn’t a problem until later on anyway.”

Until later, when the traffic noise was enough to drive a person insane, when someone started a fight in the room below mine, when all I wanted was a breath of Whitney’s shampoo and all I could smell was the reek of musty carpet.

“Couch is open. But”—a yawn stretches his face—“maybe I’m an old man now, but I don’t have all night to listen to you bitch and moan.” Summer gives him a playful slap on the shoulder. “I mean, we’re here for you. Tell us all your problems.”

I look at them, sitting there in their happiness, with their cold beers and bedhead, and I’m at a loss. What the fuck am I supposed to say? I want what you have, and I could have had it with Whitney? It’s all so viscerally pathetic that I have to hunt for the words.

I open my mouth.

Dayton tenses, his back coming to attention, and he and Summer both turn their heads toward the house. The backs of my hands tingle with adrenaline. What’s going on? What are they doing?

The sound hits me a moment later—a thin, high wail.

Day doesn’t hesitate. He gets up out of his seat, taking his beer with him, and strides into the house. Summer relaxes back into her seat, her blue eyes flickering along with the fire.

“You could get her back, you know.” She raises the beer to her lips and drinks, the movement delicate somehow.

“I will wait for dawn if it means having this conversation with Day instead of you.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, asshole.” Summer’s eyes sparkle at her own snappy comeback. “It’s an easy choice, Wes. You can either suffer, or you can listen to me.”

“It’s all suffering.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’m happy to let you dangle on a hook of your own misery until—”

“Just say what you have to say. It’s late.”

“Says the man who woke me up in the middle of the night.”

“You were never supposed to be part of this.” In every way possible, she was never supposed to be part of this. I was never supposed to be part of this.

“You made a bad mistake with Whitney, but you can fix this. And you should, because she keeps calling me for emergency lunches, and I can see she’s been crying underneath her makeup. It’s terrible, Wes. She’s devastated.”

The heat rises in the pit of my gut. “It’s never going to work out. She doesn’t understand that I’m trying to—”

“Beat the world into submission with your bare hands?”

Summer looks at me steadily over the fire. She radiates an obnoxious calm. There’s probably no question in her mind that Day is going to come back and sit right next to her, and here I am, aching for Whitney to be curled up in the next chair over. Her absence is a visceral wound, and I caused it myself.

“You know you can’t do that all on your own.”

It’s not a question.

“I know.”

“Wes...”

“I fucking called, okay? This morning. I called the VA. I’ll go talk to whatever shrink they want. Okay? I get it. I fucking get it.” One phone call doesn’t release the pressure in my mind. It can’t. And not even tomorrow’s emergency appointment will do that. Because the pressure has a shape, and a name. Ben Powell’s voice had the ring of truth to it, and it hasn’t stopped ringing yet.

Sunny presses her lips together, and her eyes shine brighter in the firelight. “That’s—” She nods, her fingertips rising to her lips. “I’m proud of you.” She could go farther. She must know that Dayton tried to convince me it would be a good idea to do some talk therapy at the very minimum. But Summer isn’t a little girl anymore, needling me to get attention. She’s an equal.

“Don’t be fucking proud of me. It took losing her to figure it out. The price is a little steep.”

She gets up from her chair, leaving the beer on the wicker table, and comes around to me, leaning down to wrap her arms around my neck. Her touch tears at the wound around my heart, scraping and bleeding, and I swallow back a painful lump in my throat.

“You can’t stop me. I’m still proud. I know—” She breathes in and I see it then, how close she’s been to Dayton’s own hurt all this time. How she carries the weight of it on her own shoulders to lessen his burden. “I know.”

I see how Whitney, in her own way, tried to do that for me.

And I see the chasm between us, now that I left her. Now that I did her fucking bidding and left her, and wrenched myself away from the one person that made this life seem worth fixing.

Summer straightens up, wiping at her eyes. “Listen to me.”

“I’ve been listening. What do you think—”

She drops into the chair next to me and looks me in the eye. “In all the time you’ve been with Whitney, haven’t you ever stopped to think about why she is the way she is? God knows it can be tiring. And...over the top sometimes. But you know why, right?”

I take another swig of beer and pull myself together. “I assume she’s always been that way. I’ve always been on top of my life, and she’s always been—I don’t know, flighty.”

“She is that way because of her dad.”

Whitney’s face comes back to me then, red-eyed, desolate. “She told me about her dad.”

“How much did she tell you?”

“That he was—” The conversation seems like a million years ago. “That he was kind of an asshole, and he was killed by a drunk driver.”

“From what she told me, he wasn’t a very good dad. He was the kind of man who always wanted to have a good time, and he hated it when Whitney had different ideas about what that meant. They’d fight. But they were alike in ways, you know? When things were good, they were good. That last fight—” Summer shakes her head. “It must have been awful for them both.”

“It must have been, but I don’t see what that has to do with this.”

“Everything, Wes. Whitney took that to heart. She knows the clock is ticking. On life, I mean. Which sounds morbid and totally depressing, but she knows it can all go away in an instant. And I think, on some level, her dad felt that too.”

We’re silent for a moment.

“It’s obviously a complicated situation, but I think that Whitney is the way she is because she’s trying to live up to an idealized version of what he would have been like. She’s trying to seize every moment she possibly can. Make it all magical.”

She’s got that right.

“And then...you know, if one of us were in a Broadway show, Mom and Dad would be in the front row.”

“Of course they would be. It would be embarrassing as fuck, with how Mom can get.”

“Whit’s mom has never been in the picture. And her dad won’t be in the front row on Friday. And even if they fought—”

“She’d still want him to be proud of her. Jesus Christ.” I drop my head into my hands. “Well, that settles it. I need to pack up and move on. I took that pain and dug into it with my own nails.”

“Oh, stop, Wes. Have you talked to her since you two split?”

“No.”

“She’s a mess. And she misses that you cooked dinner at the same time. That’s”—her mouth drops open while she searches for the words—“unprecedented. The Whitney I know and love would never allow herself to get excited over something as pedestrian and predictable as dinner at the same time. You were good for her.”

“Yes. That’s why she wanted me to fuck off.”

“Maybe she wanted you to fuck off because she was pissed. And hurting. And maybe she regrets it.”

“I’m not waking her up in the middle of the night to find out.”

“Ah, the courteous prince. No, don’t wake her up in the middle of the night. Don’t do anything in the middle of the night. It’s almost always a bad idea.”

“Then what do I do?” It’s a pathetic question, and one I would never say out loud in broad daylight. I would never ask my younger sister for this kind of advice. I’m only skating across the edges of complete humiliation because of the hour. And because every inch of me is on fire with pain. With missing her.

“She’s never going to stop looking for you, Wes. Show her that she’s been found.”

“Jesus, Sunny, that’s the most cryptic thing you’ve ever said to me. How the fuck am I supposed to do that?”

“I know exactly how. All you have to do is follow through.”

I lean my elbows on my knees and look into the fire. “This is fucked up. I shouldn’t even be asking you for help. I shouldn’t be asking anyone.”

Summer sighs, then reaches over and pats me on the back. “No. You should have asked a long time ago. Get used to it, buddy.”

She unfolds herself from the chair and makes her way back toward the house. “Turn the fire off when you’re done staring into it. There’s an extra blanket in the closet.” She’s quick, light on her feet, and at the back door in a heartbeat.

“Hey, Sunny?”

“Yeah?” She pauses with her hand on the door, looking back with her expression open, the hint of a smile on her face.

“Thanks.”

She blows me a kiss with her fingertips and goes inside.