“He’s always needed an audience,” Jackson said quietly. “Even as a kid. If he wasn’t being admired, he wanted to be rescued. It didn’t matter which as long as the room still revolved around him.”
Carissa let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “That sounds familiar.”
Jackson gave a humorless half-smile. “When our dad used to compare us, Damen acted like it was cruelty to expect anything from him. But the truth was he only wanted the fun part of being exceptional. He never wanted the cost.”
Carissa looked at this man across from her, this brother who had been standing at the edge of family dinners for years with a patient distance she had mistaken for coldness. It occurred to her then that people often called disciplined men cold simply because they could not control them with chaos.
“I need a favor,” she said.
He waited.
“A real one.”
Jackson leaned back slightly. “Okay.”
Carissa folded and unfolded the napkin in front of her. In any other room, under any other set of facts, the request would have sounded insane. In this room it sounded inevitable.
“He wants Nikki at that reunion because he’s terrified of looking like he lied,” she said. “He wants the room to validate the fantasy he built.”
Jackson’s gaze sharpened. “And?”
“And I want him to see what it feels like when the room turns.”
Understanding moved across Jackson’s face slowly, then all at once.
“You want me to go with you.”
“Yes.”
He did not answer immediately.
Carissa rushed to fill the silence. “Not because I need a date. Not because I’m trying to use you to make him jealous. Although I’m not above that anymore, apparently. I want—” She stopped. Restarted. “I want him to stand there with my sister on his arm and look up and see that I am no longer the woman he gets to edit out. And I want the one person he’s spent his whole life measuring himself against standing next to me while it happens.”
Jackson considered that.
“What exactly would you need from me?”
Carissa met his eyes. “Be seen with me. Be kind to me. Hold my hand if it looks natural. Nothing beyond that unless I ask.”
Jackson nodded once. “Okay.”
She blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You don’t need time?”
“I’ve had about thirty-eight years of context,” he said. “That helps.”
For the first time since the kitchen, Carissa felt something other than pain in her chest.
Not relief exactly.
Alignment.
“What if it makes things worse?” she asked.