No one moved right away.
"Gunny?" one of the younger Marines said.
"You heard me," Barrett said. "Take your drinks. Take your jackets. Give them the room."
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Chairs scraped back. Boots shifted. Someone set a glass down too carefully, like any loud sound might break something that had already cracked.
Dylan stood last. He looked at me, then at Nico, then at the door.
"Ma'am," he said to me, soft. "Thank you again."
"You do not have to keep saying it," I said.
"I know," he said. "I am saying it anyway."
Barrett put a hand on his shoulder and steered him out. No speeches. No jokes. At the door he paused and looked back at Nico.
"Staff Sergeant," he said. "We will be right outside when you want us."
Nico nodded, but he did not speak.
The door closed. The music from the main bar came through muffled and far away, a song I could not name under the hum of the lights. And then it was just us, the two of us, in a private room that suddenly felt too big for a party and too small for everything in it.
The decorations were still up. The banner still hung crooked over the bar shelf. Balloons shifted in the draft from the vent. On the table between us sat the cake I had brought, untouched except for one corner where someone had dragged a finger through the frosting earlier, and beside it, Nico's new chevrons, laid out clean and gold under glass.
He stared at them like they belonged to someone else.
"A major," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Say it again," he said. "Not yes. The whole thing."
"I am a major," I said. "United States Air Force."
"For four years."
"Yes."
"Four years, Jules."
"I know how long it has been."
"Do you?" he said. "Because I am doing the math and I keep landing on holidays. Birthdays. That Christmas at Mom's when you sat at that table and let Dad ask you about filing systems in Georgia. Filing systems."
"I never said filing systems," I said.
"You let him believe it," he said. "You let all of us believe it."
I folded my hands on the table to keep them still. "I did not think rank would change anything between us."
He laughed once, and there was nothing in it. "That is what you are going with?"
"It is the truth," I said.
"It is a sentence," he said. "That is not the same thing. Why did you never tell me? Not Mom. Not Dad. Me."
"Because tonight is yours," I said. "Look around. This is your room. Your promotion. Your Marines just stood up for you in a way most people never get in a whole career, and I am not turning your party into a briefing about me. I will not do that to you."
"I am not asking for a briefing," he said. "I am asking my sister a question in an empty room."
"And I am answering it."
"No," he said. "You are managing it. There is a difference, and you know there is, because you have been doing it to me for years." He leaned forward. The jokes were gone. I had watched them go, one by one, all night, and now there was nothing left under them to hide behind. "Every time I asked what you actually did, what did you say?"
I did not answer.
"Say it," he said. "You remember. You said it enough."
"I'm fine," I said quietly. "It's classified. I'll tell you later."
"Later," he repeated. "Later never came, Jules. Later was four years of you wearing that rank and me thinking you pushed paper and hated every minute of it. Later was you missing things and not explaining. Later was calls that lasted four minutes because you had somewhere else to be and you would not say where."
"I was protecting you," I said, and even I heard how thin it sounded in that room.
"From what?" he said. "From knowing my sister did something that mattered? From being proud of you? I could have handled being proud of you."
"From things you could not change," I said. "From worrying about things that were already done."
He shook his head slowly. "That is not what I believed," he said. "You want to know what I actually believed, all those years?"
"Nico," I said.
"I believed you just did not want me in your life."
The words landed and stayed there, between the cake and the framed chevrons, and I had nothing true enough to set beside them.
Chapter 15: The Joke
"You really thought that?" I said.