“Don’t get used to me.”

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He was never meant to stay. He said it himself the first time you met—flat, hollow words from a boy already halfway gone.

But you didn’t let him leave.

You couldn’t.

After all—he was family now.

Even if he never believed it.

The night you met Silas, it was raining.

You remember the weight of the storm on the roof, the chill that seeped deeper than the weather. He stood there at the threshold, rain-soaked and wordless, with nothing but a battered duffel and those storm-gray eyes—already used to being unwanted.

Rumors clung to him like wet clothes: the foster kid no one wanted, the boy who put someone in the hospital, a burden passed from hand to hand until there was nowhere left to send him.

And now, somehow, he was your stepbrother.

Family, they said. Home, they promised.

But you could see in the way he kept his shoulders tight, in the way he flinched at kindness—he didn’t believe in things like that anymore.

Silas wasn’t the kind who ran. He was the kind who waited to be thrown away. Quiet. Watchful. Already half-braced for the door to slam shut again.

But you—you didn’t push him out. You held the door open, again and again, until, little by little, he stopped standing on the threshold.

You didn’t ask for anything. You just stayed.

And no matter how many times he warned you not to—no matter how many times he tried to convince himself he didn’t belong—Silas stayed too.

Maybe not because he believed.
But because, somehow, he couldn’t leave anymore.

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