Chapter 2I Chose My Castaway Brother

Both of them jumped, their heads snapping toward me.

Tears spilled over my lashes. "Rowan got top marks! He has to go to college!"

My father’s eyebrows furrowed into a sharp line. "Since when do children eavesdrop on adult conversations?"

"I wasn't eavesdropping!" I balled my tiny fists at my sides, trembling. "You can't make him break his back in a warehouse just to buy things for me! I don't want his money!"

My mother’s face paled. "Maisie, who has been filling your head with this nonsense?"

My father slammed his silverware down onto the marble table with a sharp clatter. "Did Rowan come crying to you? Did he feed you this sob story?"

I shook my head wildly. "He didn't say anything to me! Nothing!"

He truly hadn't uttered a single syllable, yet the blame was already being pinned to his shoulders.

My father rose, towering over me, his voice dipping into an ominous register. "Maisie, you are eight years old. Do not let yourself be manipulated by him. He was raised running wild out there. He has an angle for everything."

A cold, unfamiliar shiver ran down my spine. For the first time in my life, my father seemed like a complete stranger.

He had always been the man who lifted me onto his shoulders in toy stores, whispering that I was his princess. But Rowan was his child too. Why did his face twist with such venom whenever he spoke about his own son?

I turned and fled back down the stairs.

Rowan was sliding the test transcript into a battered canvas backpack. Hearing my footsteps, he looked up, his expression unreadable.

"Done with the spectacle?" he asked coolly.

I shook my head, fighting for breath. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Rowan."

I walked slowly into the cramped, cold room, pushing a stack of unopened birthday packages toward him. "You can have these. You can have my bedroom on the second floor, too. My piano, my books, my snacks—we can split all of it in half."

Rowan stared at me, his eyes growing impossibly colder. "Split it in half?"

I froze, bewildered.

The corner of his mouth twitched into a bitter smirk. "Maisie, did it ever occur to your privileged little head that none of it was supposed to be solely yours in the first place?"

A hot, prickling shame rushed to my cheeks.

I hadn't meant to pity him. I hadn't meant to offer charity. But coming from an eight-year-old standing in shiny patent-leather shoes, it reeked of condescension.

He stood up. He was so tall that his shadow swallowed me entirely.

"Stop playing the saint," he said, his voice flat. "You're crying now because you're small, and crying makes you feel pure and kind. Give it a few years. When you grow up, you'll be just like them."

"I won't!" I sobbed, shaking my head violently.

From the top of the basement stairs, my mother’s voice trilled down: "Maisie! Get out of that dirty room right now. Come upstairs, it smells foul down there."

The floating text blinked back into existence:

"Rowan's Resentment Meter: 99."

"That 'smells foul' line was a direct hit... The boy is just standing there, minding his own business."

"To be fair, he isn't wrong. Once she grows up and settles into privilege, she won't feel guilty anymore."

"She's only eight years old, you guys. She genuinely just wants to help him..."

I stood rooted to the concrete floor, tears streaming down my face. Rowan stepped around me without another glance and pulled the basement door shut behind him.

The very next day, my father drove Rowan down to the family’s supply-chain warehouse on the outskirts of town.

"Get familiar with the operations," my father had declared over breakfast. "Keeps you out of trouble while you're lingering around the house."

'Getting familiar' meant hauling steel-toed crates, scanning barcodes in unventilated aisles, and reconciling inventory logs from six in the morning until sundown. No wage. No stipend.

I overheard my father instructing the plant supervisor over speakerphone: "Don't treat him special. A little hard labor builds character in a boy."

I took a heavy metal spoon and smashed my ceramic piggy bank.

Inside were all the crisp twenty-dollar bills from my birthday cards and allowance, totaling a little over a thousand dollars. Clutches of crumpled cash in my sweaty palms, I begged our driver to take me to the plant under the guise of wanting to see my dad.

I found Rowan deep in aisle fourteen, his t-shirt soaked with sweat as he shoved a heavy crate of machined brackets onto a high industrial rack.

I thrust the bundle of bills toward him. "Rowan, this is mine. It's real money. Take it for your tuition deposit."

He glanced down at the wads of cash, his arms never faltering. He didn't take it.

"If it's not enough, I can save more," I whispered timidly.

Rowan took one slow, deliberate step toward me. His voice dropped to a harsh, quiet rasp. "Save it how? With the pocket money they hand you for smiling nicely?"

He stared straight through me.

"Every single dollar you shove in my face is just a reminder, Maisie. Everything I was starved of for eighteen years, you throw away like scraps from the dinner table."

He picked up the next crate and walked away.