Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“What’s wrong?” Careful. Concerned. The good sister.
“Katy never talked to the other servers.”
The calculation behind her eyes went very still.
“She ate lunch alone. Every day. She never bragged about me to anyone, because she never talked to anyone. She was so quiet that a man who barely knew her picked up on it from across the patio.” He kept his voice level. It cost him everything he had. “You made it up. All of it.”
Dionne’s face went through three expressions in two seconds. Surprise, fear, and then iron. He recognized it, because he’d seen the same thing in his own mirror every night for a month: the face of a person deciding which version of themselves to be.
She chose the wrong one.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice was cool, lawyerly, the voice she used in depositions. “Katy is manipulative. She always has been. Her mother was the same way with our father.”
“Her mother was an addict who got clean and raised a daughter alone while your mother took the house and the car and the country club membership.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“You told me she was bragging. You told me she was building a narrative. You called me from your car, from your office, from your apartment, and you fed me lies about a nineteen-year-old girl who was so shy she couldn’t order her own coffee, and I believed you because you were her sister and I couldn’t imagine why a sister would do that.”
Dionne stood up. Her hands were flat on the glass desk and her composure was cracking, and underneath it was not guilt. He’d expected guilt. He’d expected tears, apologies, the crumbling of a woman caught in her own machinery. What he got was fury.
“I loved you first.” Her voice shook, but not with shame. With rage. “Seven years, Julian. Seven years I was in your life. I introduced you to people. I came to your launches. I sat at your table at Haven every week for three years, and you never once turned to me the way you turned to her in the first five seconds.” Her chin lifted. “She is the mistress’s daughter. She is nobody. And you threw away seven years of friendship for a teenager in a polyester uniform who can’t even make eye contact.”
He regarded her across the glass desk. The woman who’d been in his life for seven years. The woman who’d fed him poison and called it protection and let him destroy the only person who’d ever seen him without his armor.
“We’re done,” he said.
Two words. Quiet. Final. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t explain or argue or give her the satisfaction of the fight she wanted. He said it like stating the time, or the weather, or any other fact that existed regardless of how anyone felt about it.
Then he turned and walked out of her office and closed the door behind him and stood in the hallway with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and his hands at his sides, and for thirty seconds he didn’t move. He just stood there. Feeling the weight of seven years of friendship collapse into rubble and not caring, not caring about a single piece of it, because the only thing he cared about was a girl with red hair who was somewhere in the world without him, and he had no idea how to find her.
HE CALLED LUCIANO AT eleven o’clock at night.
The phone rang four times. He sat on the edge of his bed in the dark with the Los Angeles skyline glowing through the window and the phone against his ear and his free hand gripping the mattress edge so hard his knuckles ached. Four rings. Each one a canyon. Each one the distance between two brothers who had never spoken, who had orbited each other for twenty-eight years like planets in separate solar systems, bound by gravity, divided by a silence that had been built to protect them both.
The line picked up.
Silence. Not empty silence. Full silence. The silence of a man who had spent twenty-four years guarding his brother from a distance and had just heard his phone ring with a number he didn’t recognize and had answered anyway, because Luciano Salvatore always answered.
“It’s Julian.”
More silence. Longer this time. He heard a sound on the other end that might have been an inhale, or might have been something else entirely, a sound that didn’t have a name in any language because it was what a man made when the brother he’d stolen from a monster twenty-eight years ago called him for the first time and said his own name.
“I know who you are.” Luciano’s voice was low, even, and underneath the evenness was a tremor so faint that anyone else would have missed it. Julian didn’t miss it. He’d spent his life listening for things people tried to hide. “I’ve always known.”