Piper
Damn Tati for interrupting!
She’s not in the kitchen. She’s not in her room either. I assume she’s holed up in her bathroom, performing her twenty-six-step skin care routine, so I head for my room to try and unwind. My pulse is skipping in circles.
She’s nestled into the couch’s corner, wrapped in the wonky ocean-blue afghan my mom knitted during a foray into yarn and needles that lasted only one summer.
She has a glass of wine in one hand, a novel in the other.
Her hair’s pulled into a messy knot, a rarity, and—most unexpected of all—her feet are propped up on the coffee table.
The very coffee table she scolded me for leaving a water ring on last week.
“Come sit,” she says.
Her amiability is unsettling. She must be toying with me. Or she’s possessed. Still, I park on the couch, slipping my feet beneath a loose corner of the afghan, and ask, “Everything okay?”
“All good. Seems your evening progressed nicely.”
“I guess,” I say, wondering how much she saw in the hall. Henry and I didn’t make it as far as kissing, but almost. What Tati interrupted had to have looked intense.
“Henry seems nice.”
“He is. He sucks at putt-putt, though.”
She laughs, reminding me of the old Tati, the sister I knew before our parents’ accident. She laughed all the time back then, from deep in her belly. She made others laugh—me especially—with witty observations and sharp sarcasm.
“How did your evening…progress?” I ask.
“It was nice.” She looks smug, like nice is a vast understatement. “Davis isn’t the washed-up frat bro you think he is.”
“I’ll take your word for it. You look…” Relaxed. Radiant. “Like you had a good time.”
“I did. It was lucky we bumped into them, wasn’t it?”
I smile innocently. “Very lucky.” And then, to avoid accidentally setting her off, as I so often do, I say, “I’m going to bed. I’ve got to be at work early, and I’m beat.”
“Night, Piper.”
I pinch myself on the way to my room. That conversation—this whole night—feels like a dream I’m going to lurch out of any second.
I turn back to glance at my sister before closing my door.
She sets her book down to pick up her phone.
Her brows draw together in concentration before her expression eases into a broad smile.
In all the years she’s been my guardian, in all the years she’s managed the Towers, I’ve never seen her regard her phone with anything but disdain.
She’s texting Davis—she has to be.
I close my door with a quiet click, then fall backward onto my bed.
I grin up at the ceiling.
I’m free.