“Is that a yes?”
“If she wants. What time will you have her home?”
Fin checked the time on her phone. “Ah, ten?”
“Cool. I’ll already be home by then, so you can just send her up.”
Confusingly, that caused a bite of disappointment in Fin’s gut. Frowning at her own reaction, she made a sound of approval.
“All right,” he said. “I should get back to it. Have fun.”
“You too.”
The line went dead and Fin listened to the silence for a moment.
She and Kylie polished off the rest of the Chinese food that Mary had provided for dinner, and then the two of them hailed a cab. It would be a mighty expensive cab ride to get all the way from Cobble Hill to Dyker Heights, but Fin didn’t mind. She liked spending money on Kylie.
As Fin had known she would, Kylie used the map on her phone to track their progress through Brooklyn. Kylie shook her head, a smile on her face, as three texts in a row dinged through.
“Ty’s checking up on me,” she told Fin.
Fin watched as Kylie tried to hide her pleasure behind a roll of her eyes.
“Doesn’t seem like you mind so much,” Fin said with a small smile.
“It’s annoying, but not so bad,” Kylie conceded. She clicked off her phone and looked out the window for a second. “Ty’s actually not so bad. For a while he was so freaking stiff. It freaked me out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Um, like, no sudden movements. He would only ask the most boring questions, he was totally determined to pretend like this was all normal. And the neat-freak thing really bothered me for a while. I didn’t even want to leave my shoes by the door. But he’s started acting a little bit more like a person around me. More relaxed. More like he used to be on the phone.”
“You used to talk on the phone a lot?”
“Once a week. And he was always funny. Not as weird as he was when I came to live with him.” Kylie bounced her phone on her knee, looking out the window still. “It’s kind of funny because I know more about him from the internet than I do from actually talking to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well. We’ve only known the other one existed for a couple years. You knew that, right?”
Fin nodded. Via had mentioned it once.
“It’s kind of crazy to find out you have a forty-year-old brother. So I googled him.”
“What’d you find?” Fin could only pray that Ty’s little sister hadn’t stumbled across his dating profiles.
“Um, mostly his sports articles and stuff like that.” She was quiet for a minute. “He’s a good writer.”
“Mmm,” Fin said noncommittally. She didn’t want to admit to how many of Ty’s articles she’d recently read, fueled at first by curiosity and then by genuine interest. He really was a good writer.
“But it was all the dancing stuff that threw me for a loop.”
Fin, still thinking about the articles, nodded absently before she did a double take back to Kylie. “What dancing stuff?”
She was suddenly inundated with imaginary images of Tyler caught on YouTube doing a choreographed dance with buddies at a wedding. Or Tyler doing the Dougie on a subway platform and slipping on a banana peel.
“You haven’t seen the videos?” Kylie asked, a devilish light in her eyes. “Oh my god. You have to. Just for the outfits.”
“Outfits?”