Plus, I now have to rearrange my day.
“D’you know Sam Pelling . . .?” I call out. I hear him opening and closing drawers, hangers being flung along the rack. It’s haphazard and erratic. Two things Miles isn’t. “Milo?”
“What?” he says, walking out wearing only a pair of boxers and holding up two shirts. “Which one?”
I point at the one in his right hand. “That’s mine.”
“Wondered why I like it.” A grin spreads on his face. He tosses the other shirt back into his closet and pulls mine over his head. “It can be my lucky charm today.”
I frown. Miles doesn’t usually need or want luck for anything. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Milo . . .”
He’s tugging on a pair of jodhpurs and stops halfway. “I miss Dad. I wish he were here today.”
“Me too.” Ten years. We’ve now had four more years without our dad than we had with him, and yet we still feel the loss so acutely. I glance at the photo Miles has on his dresser, the one of him and Dad sitting on Zeus, my dad’s old horse. Miles is three and holding a mallet. “You know what he’d say, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Strong wrist, elbows in, bump hard.” He grins, reciting the three rules my dad always said were the key to being a good polo player.
“Just remember them, and he’ll be with you.”
He nods, then taps the photo on the dresser and walks back into the closet. “What did you ask mebefore?—”
“When?”
“Just now?”
Even though it was only two minutes ago, I don’t seem to remember, and when I do, I wonder how I forgot. “D’you know Sam Pelling?”
“From prep school?”
I nod.
“Yeah, why?”
My teeth sink into the skin on the side of my thumb. Now that I’ve started down this line, I almost don’t want to finish. I should just forget about it. Pretend it’s not true. Ignore it.
“Hen? What?”
Miles and I might be identical twins and run in the same core circles of friends we’ve had since we were younger, but Miles’s is much wider than mine. He’s on the polo team, which always attracts lots of people. I spend my spare time on the farm or, when I’m at school, in the biology department labs.
“Have you heard anything about him and Story?”
“Nope. Why?”
“I think they’re seeing each other,” I say, which is based on nothing but a hunch and the fact that he likes every single one of her Instagram posts.
Last week, he commented with a chicken emoji. Like what the fuck is that supposed to mean?
A fucking chicken, on a stack of books next to her bed.
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“We don’t talk about stuff like that.”
“Why not?”
