“Dude, we know you,” Wren said. “I can tell by the way you look at her. You like her,” she said in a sing-songy voice that had my teeth grinding together.
“Shut up, Wren. We’re not thirteen.”
“No, we’re not,” she said with a smug grin. “Which is why you should be honest instead of keeping very important things from the smart, interesting woman you seem to be involved with.”
“I don’t remember asking you,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I looked at Maddox, hoping he’d back me up, give me some solidarity against Wren’s little-sister energy.
But he just shook his head. “She’s smart, Eli. Which I’m guessing is part of why you like her.”
I had nothing to say to that since it was true on both counts.
“And she’s going through a shit time,” he added. “The last thing she needs is you lying to her.”
“I’m not lying to her,” I said, keeping my voice low, unable to resist a hurried look to the hall where Emmett and Sylvie had disappeared. “I’m just not telling her everything.”
Wren laughed. “You know that’s the same thing.”
“It’s not,” I said. “Close, maybe, but not the same thing. And the fact that she’s going through a shit time,” I said, slicing a look at Maddox, “is why I’m not saying anything. Jesus. How much has happened to her in the last week? Too much. This isn’t a big deal. It doesn’t have anything to do with her, except that it’s the reason we’re helping her figure out what happened. Or it was the reason. It’s not important.”
“I don’t know,” Wren said. “I bet she’ll think it is, and there’s no reason not to just?—”
“Come clean,” Maddox finished. “You want to keep her, don’t you?”
Like she was a stray who’d followed me home. She was so much more than that, and I didn’t like how quickly Maddox and Wren had latched onto what I’d realized earlier. That I was probably fucking up by keeping Sylvie in the dark.
“She’s not a puppy,” Wren muttered.
“No,” Maddox said slowly. “But the principle stands. He wants to keep her, and I can see why. But you realize,” he pinned me with his dark eyes, “if you’re not planning on walking away when this is done, you’ll have to tell her the truth about Silas eventually. And when you finally do, she’ll know how long you kept it from her.”
The only reason this was such a big deal—if it really was a big deal—was because I didn’t want this thing with Sylvie to be temporary. The fact that I cared was the reason it mattered. Silas was the closest thing I had to a father, andhe’d disappeared. I’d told Sylvie next to nothing about him. I was dreaming about shared closets and picket fences, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the man who’d given me the only family I had left. The longer I kept Silas from her, the worse it would be.
Fuck.
“I’ll tell her,” I muttered. “Just not right now. Let’s see if she can get some good news before I piss her off.”
“You just don’t want to cut off access to the nookie,” Wren said with a smirk.
“Ugh. Seriously, what are you, my grandmother? Who calls it nookie?” I said.
“Anything more graphic and I have to imagine you doing it with Sylvie.” Wren’s face twisted with distaste. “Gross.”
“Trust me, it’s anything but gross,” I said.
“I’ll take your word for it. And it’s not the Sylvie part of it,” she said with a grin. “Sylvie’s hot. It’s you.”
“Ow. My ego,” I said.
“Your ego is healthy enough.” Wren laughed, shoving her shoulder into mine. “They’re probably going to be a while. Emmett wanted her to call both banks and her credit card companies. Come help me cross-reference the printouts from that other drive. I pulled anything that had numbers that might match the clue. So far, nothing.”
“I’m on it,” I said. “Something’s going to shake loose eventually.”
I followed Wren and Maddox to another cubicle, this one with papers spread out across the desk. Wren pulled back the chair for me.
“You start. I’ll get you a coffee. I think I’m partially blind from squinting at numbers for an hour already thismorning.” She pointed at the paper. “That’s what we’re looking for.”
I settled in to kill time until Sylvie came back, hoping the mind-numbing boredom of sifting through data would dull the ache of guilt lurking in my chest. I had everything under control. I’d figured out all the angles. I just had to hope we got the answers we needed before Sylvie discovered how much I’d been keeping from her.
Chapter Twenty
