You learn early that the Cody house breathes differently than most places.

It isn’t just the ocean air curling in through cracked windows or the way the floorboards creak like they’re warning you to watch your step. It’s something heavier. Something that settles in your lungs and stays there, quiet and suffocating, until you forget what it felt like to breathe normally.

You followed J here.

That’s the simplest way to explain it, even if it isn’t the whole truth. You were just the neighbor’s daughter once—background noise in a life that didn’t belong to you. You grew up alongside him, close enough to see the cracks, far enough to pretend you didn’t. And when everything in his world burned down and rebuilt itself around this house, you stepped into the ashes without hesitation.

Smurf let you stay.

Not because she’s kind. Not because she cares. But because you looked her in the eye the first time she tested you—really tested you—and lied so cleanly it didn’t even feel like a lie anymore. Like instinct. Like breathing.

So she kept you.

And just like that, you became something almost like family. Almost.

You move through the house like you belong, slipping into conversations, into jobs, into silences that most people would choke on. You learn when to speak and when not to. You learn how to watch. How to listen. How to disappear.

You learn him. Pope.

He doesn’t look at you the way the others do. There’s no casual acknowledgment, no easy familiarity. When his eyes land on you, it feels deliberate. Measured. Like he’s trying to figure out where you fit in a puzzle he doesn’t trust.

It starts small. It always does.

A hand brushing yours in passing, lingering a second too long to be accidental. The weight of his presence behind you in a room that suddenly feels too small. The way his voice drops when he speaks to you—quieter, but not softer.

You don’t say anything. Neither does he.

Because saying it would make it real. And real things have consequences in this house. So it grows in the spaces no one’s paying attention to.

Late nights when the house is quiet, when the walls stop listening and the ocean drowns everything else out. You find yourself in his room without remembering how you got there, like something pulled you in and shut the door behind you.

It isn’t gentle. It isn’t romantic. It’s something sharper than that—something controlled and unraveling all at once. Like he’s holding onto you just to prove he can still hold onto anything at all.

And in the morning, it’s gone. 

Slipping out before the house wakes up, before Smurf’s eyes can catch something she shouldn’t. You don’t wear his clothes. You don’t leave traces. You don’t give anyone a reason to ask questions.

That’s why he keeps you. Because you understand the rules without him having to say them. Because you keep the secret. You tell yourself that’s enough. That it has to be.

But sometimes, in the quiet moments you’re not supposed to have, you catch yourself watching him the way he watches everything else—like you’re trying to figure him out, like there’s something underneath all that control that might look back at you differently. Something that might choose you.

You never say it, though. You never ask for more.

Because you’ve seen what happens to things that get complicated in this family. You’ve seen how quickly they break. How easily they disappear. So you take what he gives you. A glance. A touch. A night that never existed by morning. Scraps. And you hold onto them like they’re enough.

Morning comes too bright for a house like this.

You keep your back to him at the counter, moving like it’s muscle memory—plate, eggs, toast, everything placed exactly how he likes it without needing to think. The pan hisses, the coffee drips, and you don’t look up, not even when you feel it.

Pope sits at the table, gaze lingering when your hands tighten just slightly around the fork. He notices. Of course he does.

His head tilts, just barely. A pause. Then, flat and blunt, like he’s asking about the weather—

“...What’s wrong with you?”