Page 94 of Not in Love

“How?”

“Just a hunch.” She hadn’t cried last night, and that fucking deposition had given her plenty of reason. “Your general vibe, as Maya would say.”

She smiled through her sniffles. “It’s because he’s my brother.”

“I know.”

“He’s younger. My brain is wired to constantly feel that I have to take care of him.”

“I know.”

“He’s being a total asshole. I’m being a complete pushover. This could escalate to a really dangerous level. I need to figure out a solution to this. It’s just . . .”

“Believe me, I know.”

His sincerity made her finally look up from her knees. “It’s embarrassing,” she admitted.

“What is?”

“Maya’s . . . great. The first night we met, you said you two used to not get along, but clearly you worked through your issues. Meanwhile, I’d get a restraining order for my brother if I weren’t a fucking wimp.”

He nodded. “Maya is great, and we now have a good relationship that I wouldn’t change for anything. But . . .” He swallowed. “Want a story?”

“Depends. Is it terrible?”

His laugh was low. “It’s the most terrible of all of them, Rue.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. Her nod was solemn.

“I don’t even know where to start. How about—Maya is great now, but when she was fifteen, she slashed the tires of my car because I told her she couldn’t go to a midnight screening of some shitty horror movie on a school night.” He winced at the memory. “And when I grounded her to punish her, she slashed the new set, too.”

Rue’s eyes widened. And then deviated from their routine: she asked a question. “Who gave you the right to tell your sister what she could and couldn’t do?”

“Are you siding with her?”

“No.” She sniffled. “Maybe?”

He chuckled. “I got custody of her when she was eleven. The court gave me the right. Literally.”

“And your parents?”

“They died one year apart from each other. Unrelated. My mom first, acute leukemia. Then Dad—car accident.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“And you were her only remaining relative?”

“There are some scattered uncles and second cousins, but none here in Austin, and none she knew well. I was an adult and her brother. There was no question in anyone’s mind that I should be the one taking care of her—not even in mine.”

“If someone asked me to take care of an eleven-year-old, I wouldn’t know where to start,” she mused.

“Same here. Maya was a toddler when I moved out for college. I didn’t get along with my parents, so I rarely went back home and hardly saw her.”

“Is that why the last thing you told your mom . . . ?”

“About being a shitty mother?” He sighed. “My dad was the kind of disciplinarian who’d ground you for days for a perceived eye roll, and I was . . . a shithead. His approach did not work for me. Constant fights, ultimatums, threats—them trying to get me to be less wild. Me being ever more wild, out of spite. All that teenage shit. And my mom, she deferred to him in everything, so.” He shrugged. “If I could talk to them now, adult to adult, maybe we’d get over that stuff. But I moved to Minnesota to play hockey. Took all sorts of part-time jobs. I’d go back home once a year for a couple of days, tops. Then grad school started, and you know how busy it gets. I was in the same city as my family. I could have visited more, but home was a place where I’d been miserable for three-quarters of my life, and there was so much baggage on both our ends. The last time I saw my mom was on my birthday. They invited me over for dinner. The conversation devolved into the usual recriminations. A few weeks later my mother died.” He’d had a decade to work through the kinks of these regrets, and they were still tangled in his head. Always would be. As it was, he couldn’t stand his fucking birthday. “Then my dad, fourteen months later. And I was my sister’s guardian.”

Rue’s eyes held neither pity nor condemnation. “Was Maya . . .” She shook her head. “Were you okay?”

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