A snort escaped me. “Goodbye for now.”
When I returned to my desk, a fist pump or two escaped my body. A few people at their desks gave me the side-eye, but my spirit wasn’t affected. I had to text my friends. I had to call my parents.
I had to—damn it, I had to get the details from Noah.
6
NOAH/MACEY
Noah
One of my favorite hobbies was one that my manager Ezra said he wouldn’t hesitate to fire me over if I ever shared publicly. That seemed over the top, considering it was building LEGOs, not murdering puppies.
Ezra thought I was starting to lose the “bad boy” image we worked hard to create and posting about LEGOs would shatter it completely. I told him it would add some layers to the image, but he threw an onion at the wall and said the vegetable needed to be more layered than me.
Another thing I hated about social media: once you showed a different side of yourself, people lost interest. Maybe bad boys weren’t supposed to like LEGOs, but I found it fun. LEGOs sparked my passion for architecture when I was a kid. Who would have thought a stocking stuffer would change my life?
Even now, I could easily spend nights building the newest set (and spending a portion of my paycheck on it—seriously, why were they so expensive?).
Besides, hot people built LEGOs.
I was working on the roof of a three-story LEGO buildingwhen someone pounded on my door. I abandoned the set on the carpet to answer.
Arms immediately surrounded my torso.
“Noah!” Daphne stuck to me like a sloth would a tree.
On instinct, my arms wrapped around her. Internally, my brain was still trying to compute what was happening. It was spring break. When I invited my sister to Chicago, like I did her freshman year, she had snickered and said, “I have friends, you know.”
Panicked, I double-checked there were no other twenty-year-olds waiting down the hall.
“What happened to New York?”
In lieu of an answer, Daphne tightened her arms around me. Okay. Okay. This was the hardest part of being a caretaker. What would Mom do?
She wouldn’t say anything. She’d just let Daphne get the feelings out. So that’s what I did. Just two siblings, hugging it out in the middle of the sixteenth floor.
There was a suitcase at Daphne’s feet. Suspicion stirred like a cat from a nap, but I swung open my apartment door and ushered her inside.
She paused in the entryway. “Your place is a mess.”
Messwas a strong word considering it could have been a lot worse, but her point stood. There was an avalanche of clothes cascading from my overflowing laundry basket in the corner. Dishes from last night needed to be washed. Unfolded blankets and pillows covered the couch. A stack of books on the coffee table sat entirely out of place.
“I would have cleaned if I were expecting company.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” she said. “Not if it was me.”
I snorted as I started folding the blankets on the couch. She was right. “No, I wouldn’t have.”
I didn’t need to impress Daphne, and we’d lived together themajority of my life. She knew every habit of mine, good and bad, and she loved me anyways.
My little sister held a lot of those same habits. From the little things, like our granola obsession, to the big things, like visiting our mother’s grave every December, we acted the same. Funny, considering if someone were to stop us on the street, they probably wouldn’t have guessed we were siblings.
Daphne took after Mom. She had Mom’s curly dark brown hair and hazel eyes, along with a heart-shaped face and two dimples on both sides of her mouth. Her smile was wide, covering her face, and it appeared now when she sat next to me on the couch.
Meanwhile, I took after Dad’s appearance, though the only reason I knew that was because of old photos. There was a box of photos Mom kept hidden under the bed: from their wedding day, their honeymoon cruise, happy days outside in the park. I didn’t find them until after the funeral.
Six years ago, I had just finished my junior year of college at Cornell when Mom died in a car crash. With an absent, out-of-the-picture Dad since day one, that left Daphne and me on our own.
