PROLOGUE
PARKER
Freshman Year
“Can I sit here?” a short brunette girl asks, then bites her lower lip.
I look curiously at the empty desk next to me in the lecture hall, wondering why she’d even bother asking. “Uh, sure.”
She smiles sweetly and takes the seat without a word. I count to ten slowly, then adjust my glasses until they stop sliding down my nose. I really need a new pair, but money is tight for my twin brother and me. We subsist solely on the miraculous scholarship we somehow finagled out of Eastport University.
“Hey,” the girl whispers during the best part of the lecture.
I send her a severe look, hoping to silence her. “Yes?”
“I like yourglasses.”
“Okay.”
She taps her pen on her notepad with an easy smile. “Are you free?”
I stare blankly at her. “For what?”
She stares back. “Like, for coffee?”
She is the third girl to ask this of me since I started at Eastport University. Do they want to copy my homework? I ignore her question and return to listening to the professor. I went my entire life without getting any attention, but suddenly college has brought up new opportunities. I don’t care much for dating or hooking up, though I have to admit the attention is very flattering. It’s nothing compared to the attention Jacob has always received. Fraternal twins are a trip. I’m convinced he sucked up more nutrients in utero to give himself an unfair edge.
When I push through my dorm room later that beautiful September day, I don’t expect to see Jacob, looking exhausted, sitting on the bed with an open envelope cradled in his hands. He lifts his wary gaze to me, and a shiver rolls through me at the weight of it.
“What’s that? Is it about the life insurance payout?”
We got a small life insurance payout when our mom died a few years ago, but we didn’t gain access to it until we turned eighteen. Why a nurse had no will is beyond me. But between the insurance and the scholarship, I still don’t know why Jacob feels the need to work.
Jacob shakes his head tiredly. “No… it’s an invite to an exclusive club.”
I hold my hand out for the invite, lifting it up to read it over carefully. It’s for a date and time at the end of September, and there’s also two checks—four thousand dollars for both of us—tucked neatly in the envelope. My eyebrows lift into my hairline at the numbers on the checks.
“Seems like free money,” I say as I hand him back the envelope.
Jacob scowls. “Don’t be flippant. There’s no way we can go. Right?”
Well. I’m apt to say yes because it’s money, and it seems sort of harmless. The address is for the other side of Eastport in the evening, so the worst part will be that Jacob will have to miss a shift at the diner.
“I think we should go.”
Jacob groans and tosses himself back on the too tiny twin bed, his feet dangling precariously over the edge. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well, we don’t lie to each other either. We’re going.”
Jacob winces. “Well… technically this is the second letter.”
I narrow my eyes, pushing my glasses up my nose. “Explain.”
“We got one a week or so ago, but I ignored it. Also, the checks were only for two thousand each then.”
“What the fuck, dude?”
Jacob looks appropriately scolded. “It just felt fake.”
