It started with a smile.

A real one. Soft and quiet. Like sunlight slipping through the cracks of a stormy sky.

Hughie saw it from across the lunchroom—her smile. Lizzie Young’s twin. The girl who hadn’t spoken, laughed, or looked alive since Caoimhe passed. The girl who once made sitting in silence feel like a full conversation.

She was sitting alone at the edge of the cafeteria, fiddling with the corner of her lunchbox, barely touching her food. But something—something one of the Year 9s had said at the next table—had made her smile.

And for a second, Hughie’s chest hurt in the best kind of way.

Then Lizzie stormed in.

He knew that walk. The sharp one. The one that said her hands were shaking and she didn’t want anyone to see.

She stopped at the end of her sister’s table. Loud enough now that half the cafeteria turned to look.

“Oh, so you can smile?”

Her sister blinked, startled. The smile faded instantly, like it had never belonged there to begin with.

“Where was that when I needed you?” Lizzie’s voice cracked. “Where the hell have you been for the last year?”

Hughie stood from his table. Joey grabbed his sleeve to stop him, but he shook him off.

“I buried one sister,” Lizzie snapped, voice rising. “But you? You disappeared too. You didn’t even try. You just shut down and left me to drown alone.”

She was crying now. Loud and angry and scared.

Her twin’s face crumpled, her knuckles white as she clutched the edge of the table.

Hughie was there before he could think better of it, sliding in beside her. He didn’t touch her. He just sat, close enough for her to feel someone was on her side.

Lizzie looked at him—really looked—and her expression twisted.

“You don’t get it, Hughie,” she said. “You think you do, but you don’t. You still have your sister.”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t argue. He just looked at her with that same gentleness he always gave her sister.

Lizzie wiped her face with the sleeve of her jumper, breath hitching.

“It’s like I lost both of them, you know?” she whispered, quieter now. “Caoimhe died. And she stopped existing, too.”

She turned to her twin. “You stopped being my sister.”

Then she walked off—shaking, biting back sobs, and leaving a room full of stunned silence behind her.

Her twin sat frozen beside Hughie, eyes glassy and far away.

He leaned in, careful.

“Hey,” he said softly. “You don’t have to say anything. But if you ever feel like smiling again, even just for a second…”

He hesitated, then looked her dead in the eyes.

“…Smile at me.”