Page 38 of The Facade

“Well, I’m happy for you. You deserve it.”

He nodded. “I saw you talking to Ben after the ride yesterday. Is there anything you need to tell your big brother?”

“Just that I actually talked to him,” I said. “Nothing you need to get allprotective older brotherabout.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep.” I rubbed my finger along my napkin and in as nonchalant a voice as I could manage I said, “He invited all of us to the haunted house this weekend.”

“The one at the old Richardson mansion?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said. I hadn’t exactly clarified. But that was the only haunted house in Eden Falls that I knew about.

“Well, I’ll ask Ava if she feels like getting scared Friday night, so I can keep an eye on you and Ben.”

“You do remember that this isn’t the eighteenth century and that I really don’t need a chaperone whenever I’m with a guy, right?”

“I know.” He shot me a half-smile. “But I also have a little insight into the mind of a teenage guy, and so you can’t blame me for wanting to keep you safe.”

“Does that mean Mack should be chaperoning you and Ava every time you get together?” I raised an eyebrow, letting him know that the double standard wasn’t fair.

But he just smiled and said, “I’m a complete gentleman so Mack’s services are not needed.”

Yeah…sure he was.

I’d caught him and Ava making out once before, and while I was pretty sure they didn’t take things any further than kissing when they were alone, it was definitely not the kind of kissing you’d find in a Hallmark movie.

I pushed the image away. I really didn’t need to picture my brother kissing one of my friends before I’d gotten my breakfast down.

Carter rinsed his dishes off in the sink, and then after pulling his backpack over one shoulder, he said, “I’ll see you at lunch.”

“See ya.” I waved goodbye, and then focused on finishing my breakfast before I was late for school.

Mackand I had our biology class together later that day. When I asked him if he’d sleepwalked last night, he said that the magical powers of my room had kept him in the bed all night. So I figured that was a win.

He didn’t come to any of our group study sessions after school and the next two days were pretty similar. I only saw him in the two classes we had together or during lunch, and I worried that I might have said something wrong the night he’d stayed in my room. He’d been acting slightly off after I’d laughed at the thought of us secretly dating. Then again, it was probably just him worrying about the things going on with his mom, so I tried not to think too much about it.

On Friday night, all our friends were climbing into Carter’s truck and Nash’s car to head over to the haunted house together when Mack suddenly appeared in the driveway beside Carter’s black Ford Raptor, asking, “Got room for one more?”

“Of course,” Carter said. He pressed the button to unlock the truck doors. Since Elyse and I were both sitting on opposite ends of the backseat, I scooted toward the middle to make room for Mack.

When he climbed in beside me, I was reminded of how he was basically a giant compared to me because while I had plenty of room for my legs back here, his knees pressed right into Carter’s seat in front of him and he had to duck to keep his head from touching the roof.

“Want me to trade you seats?” Ava asked from the passenger seat, noticing how smushed Mack looked next to me.

“Naw, it’s fine.” Mack waved away her offer as he pulled his seatbelt around him. “I wouldn’t dream of coming between you and your boyfriend. Carter might get confused by the family resemblance and try holding my hand.”

Everyone laughed because while we’d noticed a few similarities between him and the twins since finding out they were half-siblings, there was about zero chance of anyone ever confusing Mack for his very feminine-looking sisters.

He finished buckling in, his fingers accidentally grazing against my hip in the process, and then we were following the lime-green BMW carrying Nash, Scarlett, and Hunter toward the old Richardson mansion on the other end of town.

“I didn’t think you were going to come,” I told Mack as we drove through the dark neighborhoods of Eden Falls.

He shrugged, his broad shoulder brushing against mine. “My mom went to bed early tonight, so I decided I might as well distract myself for a couple of hours.”

“H-how is she doing?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer in case it was worse than I thought.

He let out a low sigh. “Her headaches have been worse the last couple of days and so she’s been sleeping a lot.”

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