Page 93 of Dreamboat

I brush past him and start walking straight toward what appears to be a massive office with glass walls.

It’s opaque so I can’t see who is behind the closed door, but I’d bet everything I own Victor is in there.

I feel him near me. Call that twin intuition or false hope, but I sense he’s close by.

“Mr. Hunt is in a meeting.” A woman’s voice trails me. “In his office.”

“Hey, Mr. Hunt.” Another woman crosses my path. “I love the new look. You look at least five years younger like that.”

It’s just another note to pass onto my twin.

I’m just a few steps away from the closed office door when it swings open.

Wearing a white button-down shirt, dark trousers, and suspenders, I see my face reflected back at me. The only difference is the beard covering his.

Victor finishes rolling one of his shirtsleeves to his elbow as he casually studies my face.

Gasps punctuate the silence behind us. It lures my brother’s gaze past me toward his dozens of employees. “Get back to work.”

The scurrying I hear behind me tells me that they’re all doing as told.

I swallow hard and finally take Delia’s advice when his gaze lands back on my face. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he says back. “Come in and take a seat.”

“Is it Mom?” Victor asks I settle into one of the three leather chairs that face a large steel desk.

I’ve followed his career closely enough to know he owns one of the largest residential real estate firms on the Eastern coast. My brother has made a success of his life. I’m proud of him. Maybe one day I can tell him that.

“Mom’s good,” I assure him. “She’s living…”

“In Montana,” he finishes my sentence the same way he used to do when we were kids.

“You’ve kept tabs on her?”

He rakes his hand through his hair the same way I often do with mine. The simple gesture catches me off guard. “I worry about her, Donovan.”

That shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. He left with our father after our mom realized he was cheating on her. Our dad crawled into bed with our mother’s best friend whenever he had the chance for years.

Our mom wanted out of the marriage, but she wouldn’t say why in front of Victor or me, even though we were old enough to understand. I didn’t learn the full truth until years later when she confessed it all. She didn’t want to tarnish my image of my dad even though he had broken her heart.

Protecting those she loves, or once loved, had proven to be her downfall.

She may have lost a disrespectful partner when she split with my dad, but she lost a son, too.

Victor left town with our father because the lies he told my brother outweighed his ability to see the situation for what it was.

He believed it was my mother who broke her vows. Victor saw her actions as the source for the decimation of our family. I tried to reason with him, but all that got me was a black eye.

“She worries about you.”

That lures his gaze back to my face. “What does that mean?”

If it were decades ago, I’d snap back that I’ve always been the smarter one, but Victor held his own. He graduated with a business degree from a college in Indiana. He started working at a real estate office then, handling rentals.

He got married, but was divorced within eighteen months. A short engagement to another woman followed that, but that didn’t lead anywhere. From what I could tell by scouring social media and every online article I could find about him, he’s devoted his time to his business since relocating to Boston and building this juggernaut of a company that is now worth more than a billion dollars.

His commitment to get to this place in his life is admirable.

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