Chapter Fourteen
Isla
I stepped out of the sterile facility that housed the sea of nameless, faceless doctors that I’d taken to calling the Medical Industrial Complex, and twirled in the bright, hot sunlight.
“See?” I grinned at my brother. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Not for another year.” He scanned the sidewalk, street, and parking lot.
I stopped short. “The doctor said three to five years.”
My brother looked down and focused all his attention on me as if he were about to speak to a five-year-old. “She said one year, Isla. Then three to five years.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I thought you were here because you loved me.” He didn’t say the words often, if hardly ever, but I did. And I made sure he always knew how much I loved him because that wasn’t a word we heard growing up, not even from our mother. And especially not from our father.
“One year,” he reiterated.
I silently chanted, Five. “I think we should celebrate. I want a new dress.” Or rather, a real dress.
A pretty one. I’d been noticing how a lot of women in Miami Beach were put together nicely.
I wanted to be that for a day, try it on, see how it felt.
“We could have dinner.” The hotel was so expensive, I was sure the restaurant would be amazing and have fresh ingredients.
A shadow I knew well fell over my brother’s expression as he reached into his pocket.
“Oh no.” I held my hand up. “We’re not doing this.
” For reasons I didn’t want to think about, tears threatened.
And I didn’t cry. I didn’t do tears at all.
Not since I was little and discovered they didn’t make a difference.
They’d only made our father mad, which in turn made my brother mad, and then my brother would disappear for days, and my mother would blame me.
Tears were bad.
Nuclear bad.
My brother pulled me into his arms for a hug that lasted exactly long enough for him to slip the familiar shape of his invariable parting gift into my shorts pocket.
“Buy a dress. Have dinner at the hotel. Charge whatever you want to the room.” He stepped back to look down at me with that serious expression that never left his handsome features anymore.
“Stay in the suite. It’s paid through next week.
You want longer, tell the front desk you’re staying. ”
“And you’ll handle it.” I couldn’t help the sarcasm that laced the comment. It was the only defense mechanism I had right then.
“I’ll handle it.”
I didn’t want him taking care of me. “I don’t need this.”
“This isn’t about need.”
Yes, it was, but it wasn’t mine. “I could argue that point.” It was his need.
Maybe to take care of me, to make up for all those times he took off when we were kids.
Maybe for all the years he spent downrange, or for what he did now.
Maybe all of it, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want him to feel any of those things.
In a rare show of humor, he teased, but he didn’t smile. “You could argue with a brick wall.”
I forced a grin. “Quite a few have gotten in my way.”
He ignored my self-deprecation. “Thank you for dinner last night.” He kissed the top of my head. “I’ve got to go.”
My heart sank about a hundred layers deeper than it usually did when my brother was leaving.
It always made me sad, but I tried to never dwell or have bad days.
The world was too big of a place. It had more beauty than you could possibly experience in one lifetime, so I tried to never waste a single day.
But ever since Cap d’Antibes, things had been… different.
Maybe I was different.
I looked up at a face I knew almost as well as my own, and yet it felt as if I were staring at a stranger. Every turn around the sun seemed to foster a distance between us, but then I wondered if I’d imagined that there ever wasn’t distance.
Dancing around the improbable, I dared to hint at the one thing I’d never asked of him—wouldn’t outright ask of him—because it was unfair even saying it out loud. “What if I wanted you to stay?”
“I can’t.”
His answer, immediate and final, took me off guard so badly that I simultaneously fell apart, reached for denial, and verbally pushed back. “Can’t or won’t?” Oh, how I wanted this to be about money. “We don’t have to stay at the Four Seasons.”
“You’re staying.”
Knowing better than to argue with him, I tried anyway. “Okay, but hear me out. We could just grab the leftover food from the suite. Then with the cash you just gave me, I could get us—”
“Isla, stop.”
“Why?” Why couldn’t we spend a little more time together? “I don’t need an oceanfront view.” Or even a roof over my head.
“The suite’s booked and paid for. You’re staying at least through next week.”
While my own income stream was practically nonexistent, my brother’s seemed to grow exponentially over the years. I never asked how, and he never offered any explanations. He just kept depositing funds into my bank account and giving me cash every time I saw him.
Sometimes I spent all the cash, but most of the time, I deposited at least half.
I made a game of how little money I could actually spend.
Like our childhood, I made do with what I could find, forage, or fish.
Maybe I did it because it was habit, routine.
But the growing balance in my account wasn’t.
It was emergency money for a plan I didn’t tell my brother about because he would lose his shit, or worse, stop me. In that regard, I felt bad about keeping his money. Selfishly, though, I never gave any back because it was my security blanket.
If my day came, if the what-if happened, I’d have the means to do what I needed to do.
Until then, I apparently had…. Reaching into my pocket, I grabbed what he’d slid in and pulled it out.
“I appreciate you booking a place with a view you knew I’d love, but I don’t want to stay at a hotel you never would’ve gotten for yourself.
I want somewhere you’ll be comfortable. And I have, what?
Two thousand?” That was how much he’d given me the last time I saw him.
“I don’t need even half of this. I just want—”
“It’s ten thousand, and you’re right. I reserved the suite for you. So use it.”
My eyes popped, and I shoved the folded bills back into my pocket as I whispered in a frantic fury, “What the hell, Wolf?”
My brother just stared at me.
“No.” I shook my head. “No way. I’m not taking this.” I nodded toward my pocket when I should’ve been shoving the money back at him. “This is insane.” Everything I owned fit into a backpack. I wore hiking boots or flip-flops. I cut my own hair. I didn’t carry around ten grand in cash.
“Buy the dress, Isla.”
“Why?” I demanded. “So you can leave with a clear conscience?” I regretted saying it the moment the awful accusation left my lips, but I also didn’t. I was hurt, and this felt familiar. Too familiar. Like he was more similar to our father than I wanted to admit.
“Be vigilant. Be safe.” He kissed the top of my head one more time. “Enjoy the hotel. Rest. Eat. Use the credit card for the dress.” He slid something small into my hand, then turned to leave.
Ignoring his comment about the credit card he’d given me for emergencies years ago, the one that I kept hidden in the right heel of my hiking boot, I glanced down at a new barrette that doubled as a multitool. This one was silver. “This isn’t normal,” I called after him.
My older brother, the stoic teen who’d protected me our whole childhood, the man who’d earned his Trident at twenty-one, the former SEAL who kept his promise to always find me—he looked over his shoulder. “We’re not normal, Isla.”
A second later, he was blending into the people walking in and out of the medical building before he turned a corner and disappeared.
Again.