“I can do it,” she interrupted. “I had the grades coming out of high school.”
Huh. Well. Madelaine and Theo were smart. There wasn’t any particular reason Delilah shouldn’t have been.
I’d just… yeah. The boobs, the nails, the hair. I’d assumed, like everyone else did.
The thought sat uncomfortably in my guts. It wasn’t as though I’d done her any harm, and I’d told Theo earlier that it mattered what hedid,not what he thought. All the same. It’d been an unfair thought.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked. That was absolutely none of my business, but we seemed to be having a heart-to-heart now.
Delilah glanced in a direction that gave everything away—toward her mom’s room.
“Oh.”
She sniffed again, sipping the juice that had once been mine. “This has soda water in it?”
I shrugged. “Thought you might’ve been onto something. Figured I ought to try it before deciding it wasn’t for me.”
“It’s good,” Delilah said, still defensive.
I’d never seen her like this. From my perspective, she’d been…
Well…
A not very nice word starting with B that I wasn’t going to apply to her now that we were all adults and I’d grown and changedand worked on not even thinking for years.Unpleasant, I settled on, but there was more to it than that. She’d always seemed so confident.
But then, if you didn’t know his tells, so did Theo. I was, as far as I knew, the only one who ever saw him break down under pressure. In private.
It made sense that might’ve been a family trait. Theo had said before that he couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of his mother.
If I called my mom right now and sobbed down the phone to her, she’d be over here as fast as dad could drive her to give me a hug and make me chamomile tea and cinnamon sugar toast.
“I’ll try it later,” I promised. “Horses, though?”
Delilah looked at me again. Still wary, but starting to thaw.
“I like horses,” she said. “You’re going to make fun of me?—”
“I’m not,” I interrupted, raising my hands in surrender again. “I’m not. I’m just terrified of horses, so from my perspective you’re currently the bravest person in the world.”
“Really?”
“Really,” I said, honestly. I wasn’t making any of this up. “A Shetland pony bit me at a petting zoo when I was six. Never got over it, I guess. Do you… ride?”
Theo didn’t, and I didn’t think Madelaine did. I hadn’t thought of them as a horse family, particularly.
“I did for a while, when I was little,” Delilah said. “We—swear you won’t tell my mother this?”
I smiled wryly. “You know how we feel about each other.”
Delilah returned the smile, which felt like a good sign.
“We’re moving to a ranch. Me and Corey. He grew up on one, he likes horses,” she said, leaning close and keeping her voice low.
That was brand new information. He’d never mentioned them to me—although it wasn’t as though we were best friends. The height of my intimate knowledge of him was that I knew he took his coffee with black, like a civilized person, but with a shot of sugar-free vanilla syrup. I’d tried it once out of curiosity and been pleasantly surprised but not moved to change my own order.
It occurred belatedly to me that a man from Texas who came from money probably couldn’t easilyavoidbeing around horses. I’d always assumed the cowboy act was just that—an act, a character he was playing because he thought it was charming. Because other people thought it was charming, even.
Theo had thought it was charming.
