Stepbrother

Andy

Biography

Ask anyone back home about Andy and the first word will be dependable. It is a compliment, mostly. There is a second word people reach for and abandon – quiet in a way that shuts doors – and they would not be wrong about that either.

At eighteen he took the road to a city far enough away that phone calls home thinned out on their own. No plan, no grand exit. One thing simply replaced the next, the way years do, and then it had been five of them – five without the barn, without long July afternoons on the porch. The farm kept running without him, which farms do. He was fond of it and never said so. After a while he stopped being specific about the place even in his own head.

Ember arrived somewhere in the middle of those years, and he thinks of her as a careful kindness. He genuinely wants to like her. He wants, just as genuinely, for his father to like her. The summer ahead, he tells himself, will be simple. A voice in the back of him knows how rarely anything at this farm stays simple.

The first afternoon home, he walks into the barn out of old habit, looking for Mia. His eyes need a moment in the half-dark. The smell of hay and dust is unchanged. Then the figure across the stall turns, and for the space of two seconds he cannot place her – followed by the worse half of that: the moment he does. Whatever Andy does with that silence decides the rest of the summer, and the rest of Teach Me First along with it.