Page 4 of All My Broken Dreams

He was desperate to go. Their mother was equally desperate to prevent it. Robbie didn’t have an opinion either way. Harry was her mother’s love child by a long ago lover who abandoned her and was never talked about.

Her half-brother was almost three years older than she was and much smarter. Harry claimed he had an uncle on his biological father’s side who pulled strings to get him admitted. Something about this mysterious relative freaked their mother out and she dug in her heels. Ifthatman was behind it, then her son was definitelynotgoing.

There was nothing Sarah could do to stop him. Harry was an adult and admission to Locksley came with a full scholarship. But he loved his mother and wanted her support. He didn’t understand her opposition and neither did Robbie. He asked his sister to talk to her. Get her to see sense. Persuade her.

Harry was asking the impossible. He was Sarah Listowel’s golden child, not Robbie.Hewas the one she listened to.

Their mother was alone in the world with a two-year-old when she met Robbie’s father. She told her once that it wasn’t love that led her to marry David Listowel and consequently give birth to a daughter, but desperation.

Robbie had been trying to win her over ever since. Her father filled the gap when she was growing up and now that he was gone, and Harry was gone, she felt my inadequacy in her bones.

Her dad told her once that she shouldn’t take it personally. Her mother was fleeing a toxic relationship when her parents met. David fell madly in love, but Sarah’s heart had been broken too badly to ever love again. Her honesty, brokenness and beauty moved a young David Listowel to vow he would behonored to take whatever affection she could offer him if she would be his wife.

He was a fucking idiot. Robbie loved her dad, but he was a fool to think there could ever be affection with an ice queen for a wife.

David Listowel’s love was not welcome. He adapted by pouring all of the love his wife wouldn’t accept from him into his daughter and stepson. He raised Harry as his own, loved him unconditionally and Harry returned that love.

When he died suddenly and unexpectedly last year, Harry and Robbie were both shattered in different ways. Harry handled it by running off to a school in a foreign country. Robbie handled it by retreating to her apartment and not coming back out again.

Until her brother vanished.

All she had to go on was an address and a brief explanation of how he came to be accepted to a prestigious university in Scotland. It was an evasive conversation that didn’t permit questions, not that she would dream of asking any. Harry Listowel was almost twenty-five, but he might as well be fifty. He was significantly more mature and decisive than she was. Still, his reluctance to talk about this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was not like him. When something great happened, Harry usually bellowed it from the rooftops.

She remembered that she did have one question for him.

“Why Scotland? There are excellent private universities in the United States. Why do you have to travel to another country?”

“I have family there, Robbie.”

She thought he meant the mysterious uncle, so Robbie asked their mother about him. Sarah had paled and demanded to know why she was asking. Robbie backed away from her curiosity and not for the first time. She found that as she grewolder whenever she tried to understand something about her mother or her brother, her questions were met with hostility, as if she didn’t have the right to ask.

She could handle her mother’s secrets better when her father was alive. Without him around as a buffer, Robbie felt like she didn’t have any family at all. And now fucking Harry has disappeared on her.

Footsteps echoed loudly in the laneway behind her.

Chapter Three

Someone was following her.

No, no, she thought, trying to tamp down the anxiety before it could take hold.Not following. Just going in the same direction.

Male voices carried and bounced off the eerie stone corridor. There was one feeble light near the end of the alley attached to one of the brick buildings. It wasn’t powerful enough to light the area, just a couple of garbage cans.

And her.

She looked down at her feet and walked faster hoping they hadn’t seen her.

“What are you doing out here on your own, darling?”

“Where are you going at this time of night?”

“Wait up, are you lost? We’ll go with you. Tell us where you want to go.”

Robbie paused only for a fraction to glance over her shoulder. There were three of them. Older, like around late-twenties. Wearing hoodies and oversized football jackets. Not students. She knew this instantly. Months of self-imposed exile had developed in her a finely tuned intuition about people. Likewhen you avoid caffeine for weeks and then have a cup of coffee. It didn’t take too much to jolt you awake.

“I’m fine, thank you. My friends are meeting me around the corner.”

An old trick she had from living in New York City.

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