“Because you have a penis,” she stated matter-of-factly.
He flinched in horror.
Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. “Grow up, you’re an ER doctor.”
“So?” he shot back defensively.
“So, what happened? Give it to me. My own love life is Shit City, but I’m actually scarily good at giving others relationship advice. Like,scarilygood.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged.
“Of course itmatters!” Men were such idiots. That was theonlything that mattered. She took a breath and tried to calm down, getting upset wouldn’t solve anything. “Can I ask you justonequestion?”
“Sure. You just did.”
“Ha, ha, ha.” She smacked his forearm before turning serious. “Have you talked to her about it…whateveritis?”
He remained quiet, which in itself was an answer.
“I knew it!” She clapped her hands together. “Why are men so stupid?!”
“I didn’t say anything,” he countered in a weak defense.
“Youdidn’thave to.” She took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, trying to stay calm, cool, and collected. “Look, I don’t know what is going on, but Idoknow thatyou,my dear brother, live in your head. You are always thinking a gazillion?—”
“That’s not a number,” he corrected her.
“Semantics,” she waved dismissively.
His expression turned smug, most likely over her incorrect use of the word “semantics,” but thankfully forhim, he was smart enough not to point it out.
She continued, plowing ahead, “—agazillionsteps ahead, which is great when it’s justyou. But this isn’t just you. You can’t decide things for her.”
“I didn’t I?—”
She held up her hand. “If you haven’t spoken to her, thenyes, you have. You’ve decided for her.” With that declaration, Poppy leaned down, grabbed her purse from the footwell, opened the door, and climbed out. “Oh, and don’t worry about giving me a ride home, I’ve got that covered.”
Poppy left Liam behind and walked alone in the gravel parking lot, her strappy heels sinking with every step, past a parade of gleaming rental SUVs and matte-black luxury sports cars. The path forked at a wooden sign, “Sterling-Costas Wedding,” in a fanciful, swirling cursive, and she followed the arrows through an archway of wild wisteria, her breath caught as she glimpsed the view across the valley.
The grounds of Mountain Ridge Outdoor Adventure were almost aggressively beautiful, the kind of place that made you feel like you’d fallen into the set of a prestigious TV drama about impossibly attractive and rich people who drank limited-releasesmall-batch gin and had suspiciously little cell service when one of them ended up mysteriously dead. As Poppy approached the main lodge, she could feel the thrum of energy from the wedding, guests in cocktail dresses and black ties, servers in slacks and bow ties, the soothing and dulcet sounds of a master violinist, and the golden rays of sunset breaking through the high pine canopy as dusk crept in. Every tree had been laced with micro-lights, turning the entire hillside into a galaxy of tiny stars. The effect was dizzying.
As she got closer to the deck where the cocktail hour was being held, she did spy with her little eye several children frolicking, but since they weren’t related to her, she figured she’d be able to handle it. One of the saddest parts of her situation was that she was suffering in silence, and she knew she didn’t have to be. If she told her sisters or her mom, Carmen, or Miss Carol, they’d rally around her. They’d do whatever they needed to make sure she was emotionally, mentally, and physically supported. But she couldn’t lean on them, not for this.
They wouldn’t understand. They would tell her it was fine, that it was going to be okay, that as long as she was healthy, nothing else mattered, and that there were options. Those were true things but not things she wanted to hear now.
As she joined the cocktail hour, a server in a white button-down shirt and bow tie passed her with a tray of champagne, and she grabbed a flute.
Before she’d taken one sip, the man she’d come there to see, the man who she recognized from the ax photo she’d grilled Liam about, crossed the deck path ten yards away from her.
She sucked in a startled breath and froze. A domino of split-second chain reactions toppled through her: excitement, nerves, confusion, and disappointment. The man was within spitting distance, and there were no butterflies, no tingles, and no fanny flutters, as the kids fromLove Islandsay. In fact, she feltnothing. She was teetering on despair when she remembered AJ had a carbon copy, and hope sprang eternal once more. She’d bet her entire life savings that the man she was watching head inside the main lodge was not AJ but his genetic doppelganger, Niko.
Relief washed over her. She’d pinned so much on the hope that she was and still could be madly, wildly attracted to someone based on her seeing that photo. Even if all the night held were stolen glances and an internal game of will-they-won’t-they with a player of one, she would be happy. She just wanted to feel good things again. She was so desperate she’d settle for a one-sided unrequited crush as her dopamine, serotonin, endorphin hit supplier. Especially if it came from spending an evening covertly drooling over a man who looked like a Greek-god version of Henry Cavill.
AJ watched his sister Frankie trying to make their mom’s day perfect and could see how stressed she was. He wished that he possessed the skills to make it easier for his sister, but he did not. All he could do was stand on the periphery and watch as Frankie expertly navigated the emotional and physical maze of their mother’s wedding day minefield like the mini-sized, hyper-organized, strawberry-blonde superhero she was. She effortlessly put out fires from the wrong cake order being delivered to their mom’s last-minute decision to move the wedding indoors to shifting gears in seconds to comfort Angelica, their frazzled second cousin, who’d splattered Merlot all over her pale green dress. When each crisis arose, Frankie met it with a calm authority, offering solutions that were both impressive and also broke AJ’s heart a little.
He stood to the side, hands deep in the pockets of his suit pants, a safe distance from the churning social machinery. He found himself admiring the rhythm of her movements, the way she used her arms to direct traffic, and her posture, more drill sergeant than daughter of the bride. Frankie was the youngest, but for as long as he could remember, she’d carried the weight of the twins and their mom’s emotional and physical well-being on her shoulders. Their mom was…fragile. That was putting it kindly.
After their father was killed in the line of duty fighting a fire when a roof collapsed on him, their mom spent years battling serious depression. The twins, AJ and Niko, responded in perfectly opposite, perfectly predictable ways. Niko with a combustible rage, breaking windows and rules and once, memorably, the nose of a boy who’d taunted their sister for her red hair at school. AJ with silence so loud it was deafening. Frankie, the smallest and youngest, filled the void with force-of-nature optimism. She became a master of tactical emotional triage, a first responder to every familial disaster, a fixer of wounds both visible and not. Frankie did everything in her tiny self to fix their mom, to fix Niko and his anger, and to fix AJ in his silence as he retreated into himself. She was still doing it now, her eyes scanning the room, making sure everything and everyone was okay. He was going to venture over and check on her when the door opened and three of his aunts walked in. The volume instantly increased fourfold, making it impossible for him to tolerate the space any longer.
