Page 99 of My Brother's Billionaire Best Friends
He smirks. “Because I was dumb enough to believe in her performance.”
I laugh, bitter and choked. We sit for another long minute.
Then he gets up, walks inside, and returns with an old-fashioned photo album. Sets it in front of me. “Your sisters,” he says. “And your little brother.Half-siblings, I guess. I figured if you’re here…you should meet them.”
The world tips onto its side, and my head is ringing. “I have siblings?”
“Two sisters and a brother. Olive, Clementine, and Basil.”
I blink at him.
His smile turns sheepish. “Odette had a lot of pregnancy cravings, and I just went with it. Happy wife, happy life.”
I laugh sharply, once, still reeling as I flip through the pages.
They have his eyes. My eyes. Dark brown.
We spend over an hour at the patio table. He tells me about my half-siblings. Shows me pictures from Christmas, their birthdays, even one of them on a trip to Tokyo to see Odette’s mother. Olive just started college. His second daughter, Clem, is a piano prodigy. Basil wants to be a chef. They look like a family in the pictures, laughing and vibrant.
I didn’t even know they existed. “Why didn’t I know about them?”
“I do my best to keep their names and faces out of the press. It’s not easy, especially with Olive in college now. They?—”
“Mom has to know about them.”
The jovial glow in his eyes fades. “She does.”
And she never told me.
I sit there holding an old photo of the five of them on a beach somewhere in Malibu—Jamison in sunglasses, Odette smiling in a floppy sunhat, the kids climbing all over both of them—and realize that I’ve been mourning the wrong version of family for years. I didn’t just lose my dad. I lost the possibility of this. Not the money, not the house, but the closeness. The life he built without me.
He doesn’t try to explain it away. Doesn’t apologize for it. He just lets me take it in, then pours more tea and waits for whatever comes next.
“Family’s complicated,” he says finally, as if he can see my torment. “It doesn’t get simpler when you grow up. If anything, it gets heavier. More tangled. The older you get, the more you have to choose which threads to keep holding.”
I want to say something. Anything. But my throat’s too tight.
After a moment, he leans back and sets his drink down with a sigh. “We stopped talking to Odette’s father, you know. After everything.”
I frown. “Why?”
He raises an eyebrow, looking at me like the answer should be obvious. “Because once Viv started sleeping with him, it got a little hard to have him at Christmas.”
The words land like a wrecking ball.
The words spit out of me. “No, no, no. You have to be confused. Tom Pillsbury started Icon PR to smooth over Vivian’s hit piece on Odette.”
My father takes another deep sigh. “We aren’t sure when they started seeing each other. Before the divorce, during, after…the timeline is something neither of them ever owned up to. We didn’t know it was serious until she brought him to some foundation event and introduced him as her boyfriend. Odette almost spit champagne down the front of her dress.”
I’m shaking. I don’t know which way is up. “She’s involved withhim?”
“Was,” Jamison says. “It was a long time ago, and she likes to have a new boyfriend of the week, according to some mutual friends.”
I lean forward slowly, voice rough. “The founder of Icon PR? The man who vowed—and failed—to ruin Vivian?ThatTom Pillsbury?”
“You really didn’t know?”
“Do I sound like I knew?” I don’t mean to snap. It just happens.
