“How are the Bobbsey Twins?”
His mouth kicked up, thinking of how his brothers would react to being called that by a beautiful woman not much older than them. “They’re…” He glanced up, mouth drying when he caught her gaze locked on his lips.
Was it his smile? She probably wasn’t used to it. His default setting was solemn, and he had never gone out of his way to grin at her. Testing, he let his face relax, let the grin come. Her eyebrows snapped together, and she looked down at her hands linked together in her lap.
Interesting. His heart beat a tiny bit faster. “They’re, uh, great. They opened a landscaping business last year. It works for them. Connor’s the brains. Ben’s the brawn. And the heart, really.”
“I remember them being thick as thieves.”
“They’re very close.”
“I’m glad their business is doing well.” She hesitated. “Let me know if I can help.”
Most people would kill to get assistance for a fledgling business from Akira Mori, even if that business was as mundane as a landscaping company.
He bit back the instant surge of pride, the automatic denial of help. This wasn’t Mei sneaking him a blank check out of whatever lingering emotions she felt for his father. This was a simple, gracious offer.
“Thanks,” he said humbly. “If you hear of anyone looking, I’m sure they’d appreciate a referral. You haven’t seen it, but they did my backyard.”
She wrapped her hand around her knee. “The rose.”
“Yeah.” He had spotted it sitting in a bud vase in her office yesterday, but he hadn’t said anything. Careful. They were both being so careful.
“I’ll keep them in mind.”
He nodded, beginning his nightly manipulation of the panels of the box. He had done more research on these puzzles since that first night. He’d made progress and logged each successful move in his brain, but since it took two hundred and twenty-six moves to open the thing, it was slow going. He wasn’t even a fifth of the way to solving it.
“Kati’s going to college in the fall, right?”
His chest swelled, still so proud he could burst. “Stanford,” he announced.
She nodded and drank her beer. “I wanted to go there.”
“Did you?” He cocked his head. “You went to…”
“Harvard.”
“Right.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t my scene, but I got my diploma.”
“Did your—?” He hesitated, wary of breaking their tentative peace.
“Did I what?”
He cleared his throat. “Did your parents want you to go there?”
A hard gleam entered her eyes. “No. They didn’t think I could get in. Well, they didn’t think I could get in anywhere.” She shrugged. “But I was a legacy at Harvard, thanks to my dad, and we still had hotels with my name on them at the time, so they rolled out the red carpet.”
“Ah.”
“Still, I always thought Stanford looked like a great place to go. And your sister doesn’t have motivation to get as far away from you as possible.”
“I don’t know,” he said ruefully, remembering Kati’s frosty goodbye to him that morning when she left for school. “Right now, she’s probably wishing she’d applied abroad.”
“Oh.” Akira brushed a crumb off her shoulder. She had always been slender, but the more time Jacob spent in her company, the more certain he was she had lost weight in the months since her mother had passed.
Not that he cared what she weighed, but his growing suspicion over why the change had occurred did concern him. Grief, though she might deny it. Maybe not grief over the woman her mother had been, but grief over never getting to see the woman the rest of the world saw.Of never gaining closure on their rocky relationship.
