“Oh.” Archie’s grimace morphs from distaste into guilt. “I was working on a proof. Sorry.”

“With Zeke?” I ask.

He frowns and looks away. “No. Just me.”

Zeke is a year below Archie, a junior like me. Since middle school, he and Archie would sit in our basement for hours, heatedly debating hypotheses with names as complicated as one of the old languages that dies approximately every fourteen days.

Zeke makes me laugh. A lot. We share a mutual love of Emily Dickinson, and we’re both obsessed with the Avengers. But more importantly, we both love my brother.

He hasn’t been around as often as he used to, and I can tell that’s bothering Archie. “So…how is Zeke?” I ask carefully. “I haven’t seen him at our house lately.”

“He’s busy,” Archie grumbles.

“Oh. Okay.” I chew on my cheek, wondering how to continue. “It’s just that you don’t talk as much anymore, not even to me. I thought maybe if you and Zeke—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Archie says gruffly, dropping his eyes. “It’s not your job.”

Damn it. I’ve embarrassed him. He might spend the bulk of his days in a science-induced daze, but that doesn’t mean he likes admitting that his little sister takes care of him.

Just as he takes care of me.

Pointing that out won’t make him feel any less awkward, however.

“You’re right. It’s not my business.” I pause. “Dad didn’t show up, either,” I say, just to change the subject. That particular fact isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Dad never has dinner with us. Too busy running the biotech company he founded when he graduated from Harvard at nineteen. “I had to eat the lasagna by myself.”

Archie tilts his head. “You could’ve called Lalana. She would’ve been happy to have dinner with you.”

“It’s not that.” The backs of my eyes heat. I blink rapidly, chasing away the warmth before it can materialize into something ridiculous like tears.

What’s wrong with me? I’ve eaten countless meals alone. Archie and I have always fended for ourselves, and each other, even when Mom was around. She’d get caught up in her studio so often, my childhood growth spurts were practically fueled by microwavable pizza rolls.

“Could you…come out for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” he says, but by the way his eyes travel back to the writing on his hand, I can tell he’s done with the conversation. He picks up his pen and starts scrawling another row of numbers, as if determined to fill the last few centimeters of free space.