We have something, I know we do.
“Tate?” Sullivan calls, pulling me out of my head.
“Yeah?” I stand and head toward Molly’s bedroom. The two of them are lying on her bed together, Molly beneath the covers, and Sullivan on top.
“Come and read?”
I must have misheard.
“You want me to read with you?”
“We want you to readtous,” Sullivan says softly.
“Yay!” Molly grins.
“Okay, sure.” Somehow my voice sounds natural, hiding the way my heart is thumping in my chest. This is Sullivan and Molly’s special time. He never asks me to join them.
I walk to the bed and Sullivan shuffles Molly over so there’s space for me to lie on the opposite side of her. I climb on and stretch out beside her.
She smiles up at me as Sullivan passes me a book.
“Ooh, your favorite,” I exclaim to Molly, taking the illustrated jungle cover with the dark-haired explorer on it from him.
I settle down and read. The character is on a search for lost treasure and has to figure out a clever way to descend a waterfall without being swept away. He uses a rope from his backpack and manages to craft a zipline that he whizzes down using his shirt as a hand strap.
“He’s quite the adventurer,” I remark, coming to the end of another page.
“More like a risk taker,” Sullivan mumbles.
I look up and his gaze is cast down on Molly, who’s fast asleep between us.
“Risk taker?” I echo.
Sullivan’s brow creases and he strokes a curl back from Molly’s forehead.
“It’s what I called my brother as a joke. He did some crazy stunts.”
I close the book and study the character on the front. Dark hair, blue eyes, a giant I-can-do-anything grin on his cartoon face.
“Do you read this because it reminds you of him?”
“Molly likes it.” He frowns.
“What was he like?”
Sullivan rarely talks about his mother and brother, but I’d love to know more about them. The press stories all center around their deaths, not who they were when they lived.
“He was the fun brother. And he’d also argue that he was the better looking one.”
I rest the book against my chest and turn toward him, studying the groove between his dark brows. In the photos, his brother wore his hair longer, his smile wider. There was a freedom in him—a lightness Sullivan never seemed to carry, even in the pictures taken before the loss.
“I happen to find scary CEOs the best looking. Maybe even irresistible.”
He arches a brow. “Really?”
“Really,” I whisper. “Do you want to talk about him? And your mom?”
A shutter slides down behind his blue eyes, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. “I can’t, Tate,” he breathes.
