Hudson scowls at me. “Are you telling me to leave?”
I shrug with my eyebrows. “Am I?”
Simon watches us both, the smile coming back on his face. “You have the most fascinating relationships.”
“It’s ninety percent love and ten percent resentment,” Hudson says. “Can’t really blame her though. We act like we don’t know she barely saved any insurance money for herself so that she could make sure the three of us could have a solid place to finish growing up and do anything we want to be happy, but we know.”
“Hudson.”
He’s not supposed to know.
None of them are supposed to know.
And here he is, telling a near-stranger who might like me or who might be buttering me up to destroy me.
I honestly don’t know which.
Simon doesn’t seem like anI willdestroy youkind of guy, but then, hedidwriteIn the Weeds.
So he definitely has dark in him.
Even if he meant it to be a comedy.
“Did you truly sacrifice your own financial comfort for your brothers?” Simon asks me.
“No. I had what I needed. And this is a private family matter.” I lock eyes with Hudson and point to the door. “Go buy yourself shoes.”
“You know we’re going to pay you back one day,” my brother says. “So you can do anything in the world that you want to do. And bywe, you know I mean Griff. At least until I’m world famous too.”
“You have big dreams?” Simon asks me.
“She doesn’t know what she wants to do because she hasn’t had the chance to really think about it,” the backstabbing little asshole replies.
“Hudson—”
“When Mom and Dad died, she talked about opening their restaurant in their honor, but then she had to cook dinner for us every night, so she got tired of cooking and said one of us should learn so that she could just be the manager. Then she learned to drive a bus since the driver on our route retired andsomeonehad to. Then she did whatever her latest boyfriend wanted her to do because it was easier than figuring out the hard things when she was already doing the hardest thing with handling the three of us.” Hudson rises and stretches. “And it’s a good thing she never got inspired to be an assassin for hire, or I’d be dead right now.”
He dances around the coffee table, giving me a wide berth in the easy chair as he grabs his keys from the bowl on Daphne’s small sideboard, which is carved to look like swan necks are holding it up.
She told me once that pieces like that could go from junk at a yard sale to a sought-after antique if the right furniture buyer scooped it up and convinced someone in her circles that it was worth something.
And the hilarious thing is, Margot eyes it funny every time she comes to visit.
Like she’s wondering how Daph could afford it.
When Daph picked it up at an estate sale for fifteen bucks.
“We’re talking later,” I tell Hudson.
“I’m feeling like shoveling goat shit before the sun’s up tomorrow. Good exercise.”
So he’s running away to stay at Ryker’s tonight. “You’re goat shit.”
He grins, then glances past me at Simon once more. “She never actually got together with any of our friends’ dads on those apps. She was too busy making sure Griff and I got to do everysport and club and take every kind of lesson we wanted to do. Later.”
The door clicks shut behind him, leaving me alone with Simon.
Or him alone with me.
