Page 65 of The Night We Lost Him

He takes a seat next to me, hands me a doughnut and one of the drinks. “Mango tea,” he says. “Taylor dunks her doughnut in it.”

“That sounds gross.”

“Really?” he says. “Lettuce and tomato? Not even cheese?”

I give him a smile and take one of the teas.

“No way,” she says.

We both look up to see a woman walking toward us from the direction of the courthouse.

Taylor. She is fresh-faced and pretty—and also a bit ruffled. Her wet hair is pulled back into a bun, her large puffer coat falling off her shoulder, a ton of loose papers in her arms despite her leather messenger bag.

Sam breaks into a wide smile, his face lighting up.

“I was just thinking about you, Samuel,” she says.

“What were you thinking?”

“Not that I’d find you sitting on the steps.”

She takes him in and I see her start to process. Sam sitting there in front of her, what that means. But it’s hard to focus in on her reaction when all I feel is what’s happening to Sam, to my brother. We haven’t spent much time apart for the last seventy-two hours, and yet this is the first time I’ve seen him with anything approaching the kind of smile plastered to his face. With that kind of joy.

He stands up to properly greet her, his face flushed, his eyes bright. His shoulders pulled back. Like he wants, above all, to do one thing: impress her.

“We just came from The Acres…” he says.

“So not so far?” she says.

“No, not so far.”

“Not that close, either, though,” she says.

She puts her papers in her bag, reaching out, touching the side of his face.

“Is everything okay?”

Then she looks down, they both do, as if noticing for the first time that someone else is sitting there.

I wave up at her. “Hi. Sorry to eavesdrop. I’m the sister.”

“Ah. The normal one.” She smiles at me, warm and genuine. “Well, this is long overdue…”

Sam opens the bag of warm doughnuts, holds it out for her. “I thought that I’d deliver a little sustenance.”

“Oh man, thank you,” she says. “It’s like you knew how much I needed this today.”

She pulls a doughnut out of the bag, drops it straight in the tea, and swirls it around, taking a large bite.

“My case is going south,” she says. “Opposing counsel is on the way over to pillage. City people, you know.”

“Aren’t you one of them now?” Sam asks.

That stops her midbite. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

She looks at Sam with—for some reason—an apologetic shrug. Then she moves closer to him.

“I’m so sorry about your father, Samuel. I wanted to reach out as soon as I heard that you lost him, but I also… didn’t want to reach out.”

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