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I felt my face soften. “Don’t be nervous. We’ve got this. It’s going to be fine.”

He looked at me like he didn’t believe me.

“It will. And don’t worry about the raccoon thing. To be honest, this isn’t even the creepiest thing I’ve ever had happen on a date. You’re all good.”

He laughed despite himself. Then he went a little serious again and looked away from me. “I don’t want you to think that I do this often.”

“Roadkill?”

He came back to me. “No. Lie to my family.”

I pivoted in my seat to look at him straight on. “Jacob, you do not need to tell me what kind of person you are. I know.”

He gazed at me a long moment. That quiet, thoughtful look he gave me sometimes, and I realized that behind that expression was probably the wheels of his brain, working overtime. Trying to assess the situation, worrying, overthinking like I knew Benny always did. His anxiety pinging around. A clawing internal panic nobody else could see.

But I could see it. Because I’d seen it in my brother his whole life.

I think that’s why Benny’s diagnosis was so hard on my brother. He wasn’t just living what was happening. He was living what might happen. An infinite number of what-ifs, fueled by his anxiety, each one experienced like they were going on simultaneously, eating away at him, terrifying him, tormenting him. And once he started down that path, it was so hard to stop the progression. It was a self-perpetuating cycle of emotional destruction.

One that Jacob’s selfless gesture had knocked off its trajectory.

Jacob had given Benny a reason to stop the inside screaming and look at just one way forward instead of all the possible worst-case scenarios his brain could conjure. He’d given him hope. And in doing that, he gave his restless mind peace.

And I could see, in this one quiet moment in this truck, that the screaming was going on inside of Jacob. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know it. He was worried what was going to happen with his family today. He was worried what I thought of him. He was dealing with the fact that his ex was marrying his brother, and he was probably afraid we’d get caught in this lie.

I decided right then and there that my job was going to be to quiet it all down. I would be a buffer. An emotional support person. I would throw myself over him like a bulletproof vest. Wrap him up in my protection.

“Look, everything is going to be okay,” I said. “We’re ready. My cheekbones are contoured. We’ve got wine and the dead thing…”

The corner of his lip quirked up the tiniest bit.

“We’re going to smile, and eat, nobody is going to know what we’re doing, and it’s going to be fine. Trust me.”

He let out a long breath through his nose. “Okay.”

This time he seemed to believe it. Or at least he appeared to want to believe it.

He drove us another few blocks, and we pulled up in front of a nice two-story house with half a dozen cars parked in the driveway. He sat staring up at the home through the windshield.

“It’s going to be chaos in there,” he said almost to himself.

“Okay. I’m good in chaos.”

“I’m not,” he mumbled.

I cocked my head at him. “Do you want to play a game?”

He arched an eyebrow. “A game?”

“Yeah. I think you’ll like it. I used to play it with Benny when we’d go to stuff like this.”

“Okay…”

“I give you a catchphrase. And you have to work it into a conversation. The second you do, you’re allowed a time-out from peopling. We go sit on the stairs with the dog or something.”

He eyed me. “A catchphrase? Like what?”

I twisted my lips and looked sideways. “Liiiike, ‘Not on my watch,’” I said in a fake British accent.