Chapter 559 | The Rotisserie Chicken Schedule

Chapter 559: 559 | The Rotisserie Chicken Schedule

The Fitzgerald estate looked exactly the way I remembered it, which was strange because I’d only left twelve days ago and it felt like a different lifetime. The gate rolled open on Diane’s approach. The driveway curved through the manicured grounds that Creston Hills demanded of anyone wealthy enough to live here. The house rose ahead of us in glass and stone, warm light spilling from windows that cost more than most people’s cars.

Home.

The word still felt borrowed in my mouth even after nine years, but it fit better than anything else did.

Diane parked in the garage and killed the engine. For a moment nobody moved. The three of us sat in the quiet hum of a car settling after a long drive, and I felt the specific weight of returning to a place that had almost stopped being an option for me.

I’d nearly died. I would never have seen this garage again. Sloane would have driven back here alone and walked through a front door that no longer had my hoodies hanging in the closet.

That thought sat heavier than it should have.

"Inside," Diane said. "Both of you. I made dinner before I left, which means it’s been sitting for two hours, which means it’s dry, which means we’re ordering something."

"You cooked?" Sloane said. "You never cook."

"I cook under specific emotional circumstances that I decline to discuss."

We went inside.

The kitchen smelled like something that had once been chicken and was now a memory of chicken. Diane took one look at it, made a face, and pulled out her phone to order Thai food from the place we all pretended not to be addicted to. Sloane dropped onto a barstool at the island and pulled me toward the one beside her, hand still locked around mine like she’d forgotten how to release it.

The bond hummed steady between us. Warm. Settled in a way it hadn’t been since before the Crucible.

I let myself feel it. The kitchen tile under my shoes, the familiar smell of the house buried under scorched chicken, the weight of Sloane’s shoulder against mine. All the small ordinary details of a life I’d almost lost.

I was allowed to have this. That knowledge still surprised me every time it surfaced.

Dinner arrived twenty-three minutes later, and we ate at the island like a family that had spent the last two weeks pretending everything was normal. Diane told a story about Victor Sterling doing something catastrophic on social media. Sloane stole three of my spring rolls without asking and dared me to say something about it. I said nothing about it because I valued my continued existence.

It was good.

It was so painfully, unremarkably good that I almost missed the shift when it happened.

Sloane set down her chopsticks. She looked at me sideways, that particular calculating look she got when she’d decided something and was about to inform the room of the decision rather than propose it.

"Okay," she said. "So here’s how tonight goes."

I put down my own chopsticks. This was going to be a whole thing. I could feel it building through the bond, that specific frequency of Sloane preparing to say something she’d rehearsed.

"You and Mom get two hours," she said.

The kitchen went quiet.

I looked at her. She looked back at me with her chin lifted, blue eyes steady, cheeks not yet red but heading there fast.

"Two hours," she repeated. "Because she hasn’t had you to herself in a while and I’m not a monster."

"Sloane," Diane said. Her voice did something complicated.

"After that," Sloane continued, ignoring her mother entirely, ears going pink now, "he’s mine for the rest of the night. And most of the week. I already decided."

I stared at her.

The thing about the Fitzgerald women was that they operated on a wavelength I’d spent nine years failing to fully decode. They communicated through what they left unsaid, through glances across rooms, through the specific temperature of a pause. Sloane had just cut straight through all of that and announced a schedule for sharing me like she was dividing up a rotisserie chicken.

And the truly insane part, the part that told me exactly how much this arrangement had wormed its way into the load-bearing walls of my life, was that nobody at this island found it strange.

"That’s very generous of you," Diane said. Her drawl had gone soft at the edges, the way it did when she was genuinely moved and trying to hide it behind manners.

"It’s not generous. It’s math." Sloane grabbed another spring roll. My spring roll. "You’ve been at the hospital every day for eleven days. You barely slept. You turned off your phone, which you’ve literally never done. So." She shrugged like this settled everything. "Two hours."

I opened my mouth.

"Don’t argue," Sloane said. "I watched you almost die. I’m running this."

I closed my mouth.

Smart move, actually. The girl had a Legendary Aspect and a bad attitude and she’d earned the right to run whatever she wanted to run tonight. Who was I to disrupt the machinery of Fitzgerald family logistics?

Diane was very still across the island. When I looked at her, really looked, I saw something I almost never got to see on her face.

She was barely holding on.

The composure was there. The blouse was smooth. The gold earrings caught the light exactly the way they always did. But her hand had curled around her water glass a little too tight, and her eyes had that specific glassy brightness that she’d never once let show in a boardroom.

Eleven days. She’d sat in that hospital chair for eleven days and made calls and managed crises and held her daughter and watched me not wake up, and she’d done all of it without cracking because Diane Fitzgerald did not crack. She fixed things. That was the whole architecture of who she was.

But she’d been holding her breath just as long as Sloane had. She’d just done it quieter.

"Well," Diane said, and her voice came out steadier than her hand looked. "I’m not going to turn down a gift."