10. Finn
FINN
F lying J Diner looked like a complete dive from the outside. That was what I liked about it. I ditched my suit jacket in the car—there was no need for it in a place like this—and hurried through the front door, getting slammed with a cold wave from the AC unit.
“Seat yourself!” a middle-aged waitress yelled over her shoulder at me, not even bothering to glance up from the table she was busing.
I made my way to the corner booth I’d claimed with my brothers earlier last year. We met weekly for lunch, to catch up and talk about work and family drama, and when it was my turn to choose the place, we always ended up in this hole-in-the-wall diner off the highway near the airport.
Connor would fly over from San Francisco and Liam would schlep up from VeriTV Studios, neither of them complaining much, which I appreciated.
We’d started coming here when the scandal about Violet and me had first broken last year.
It was far enough away from the usual hustle and bustle of Hollywood that it didn’t attract the paparazzi .
I’d have eaten mud on a plate if it meant I could have a meal with my brothers without being hounded—but the food was actually really good. By this point, I was downright fond of the little diner chain and couldn’t get enough of their Reuben sandwich.
“Hey,” Connor said, joining me. He was more casual than he usually was for these lunches, dressed in jeans and a nice shirt.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Grace had a field trip.”
“Already? Didn’t school like just start?”
“There’s a special exhibit at a museum—the teacher wanted to get the kids in to see it before it moved on.”
“Anything good?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Something about coral reefs. Kinda over the heads of most of the kids. The part Grace was most excited about was that she got to sit next to Kenny on the bus. Apparently, she’s still in his good books after the Run ’n’ Gun party. Your present seems to have gone over well.”
It’d taken considerable effort to get Violet to sign a framed poster.
We hadn’t talked much after our photo was blazed across the tabloids and I felt a bit awkward reaching out, but she agreed to do it since it was for my niece.
There were other things I had to agree to as well—such as a carefully negotiated line of credit in her next movie—but at least none of them would put me back in the tabloids.
“Of course it did. Point for me on the favorite uncle scale. Liam better watch out.”
Speaking of my older brother, Liam walked through the front door, heading right for us. “Mom’s looking for you,” he said, glancing down at his phone .
I rolled my eyes, checking my own phone to see that she had indeed texted me.
“You didn’t tell her you were going to lunch?” he asked, sitting down in the booth next to Connor.
I arched my eyebrow. “What? Did you want me to bring her along?”
Liam made a face—as well he should. Brother lunch was sacred. No one other than the three of us were invited, ever. “Well, no.”
“I’ll see her when I get back to set,” I said.
“How is Mom, by the way?” Connor asked. “I’ve hardly heard from her in a month.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” I inclined my head in Liam’s direction.
He currently had Mom staying with him at his Studio City mansion.
Part of me was still annoyed he hadn’t immediately texted me when Mom showed up on his doorstep with her bags—at least then I would have had a few hours of warning before walking in to find her in my conference room.
Liam huffed at the look on my face. “You’ve been glaring at me for weeks. I told you, I didn’t warn you because I assumed you already knew ! It’s your movie. Why wouldn’t you have known Mom had been hired as the historical consultant?”
“Why wouldn’t I have told you she was coming if I knew?”
“Because this would be your idea of a joke,” Liam pointed out.
I shook my head. I might be the first one to crack a joke or tease my brothers, but not when it came to Mom. “There was nothing funny about this.”
“I still can’t believe of all the experts in the country, your assistant tracked down Mom,” Connor said, glancing at his menu .
It really was some cruel trick of fate.
“ You should have warned us both she was coming down,” I said to him.
“She barely warned me,” Connor said, a little put out. He hid it well, but I could tell by the way his nostrils flared that he was still frustrated. Mom was closest to Connor out of all of us, stemming back to when we were kids.
He was the one who’d sit with her for hours in a dark room on her bad days. The one who’d bring her water and sandwiches and coax her into taking a shower. His patience with her frankly astounded me. Lord knows, I couldn’t have managed it.
I loved my mom, but I’d also spent a lot of my childhood frustrated at the dynamic where we were more often than not the ones taking care of her when it was supposed to be the other way around.
I knew real life wasn’t like the family sitcoms on TV, but it shouldn’t have been three boys raising themselves and struggling to keep their heads above water, either.
“She said she was just so excited she forgot to tell me.”
“That’s a good thing, right? I mean, it’s nice to see her so enthusiastic about something,” Liam commented. True enough, we all preferred the Mom who was energetic and excited, bubbling over with fun facts she’d learned in her latest research dive. That was the best version of Mom.
But it never lasted.
Every time her mood went on a high, I spent the whole time bracing myself for when it came crashing down again.
And sure, the lows weren’t as low as they used to be now that Mom was on medication, seeing a therapist, and had finally moved away from the house we grew up in, the house she’d been living in when Dad left and where there had been so many things to remind her of him.
But I was still bracing myself for the next crash.
The waitress finally came by to take our drink orders. We put our food orders in as well because I didn’t feel like waiting for her to come back.
“Anyway, to answer your question,” Liam said to Connor. “Mom seems to be having a good time. She’s always got loads of stories to tell when we catch up at the end of the day. Though I’m not gonna lie, having her around the house is kind of cramping what me and Mia have going on.”
I smirked, latching onto that. “By that, you mean she’s interrupting your ability to have sex on every semi-flat surface?” It hadn’t been that long since Liam and Mia had gotten engaged, and they were still in the “can’t keep our hands off each other” stage.
Liam flicked his straw wrapper at me. “Get a life.”
“Get a room,” I said. “Oh, wait. You have like thirty. Pick one Mom’s not in.
” It was always fun to mess with Liam, so it was nice to know Mom was frustrating him just as much.
Having her on set every day, listening to her bicker with X, was starting to drive me up a wall.
It made me feel a little better to know someone else was feeling the strain, too.
“No, but seriously,” Connor said. “You can’t find one Mom-free space in that massive house of yours?”
“She likes to roam, okay?” Liam complained.
“Tell Mia she has to master the art of a quickie,” I said, laughing as Liam made a grab for me across the table like we were kids again.
“Don’t start with me,” Liam said, sitting back in his seat. “’Cause I’ve heard through the grapevine you’ve been spending way more time in the costume workshop than a producer needs to. ”
“Oh, really?” Connor said, wiggling his eyebrows at me. “What’s happening in there?”
“Besides a lot of hard work? Nothing.”
“Liar,” Connor said. “Who is she? A cute assistant costume designer? Another actress? We know you like actresses.”
“As if,” I said. “I had more than enough of that drama when things with Violet went sideways. You’re damn lucky she was willing to sign that poster.”
“Mmm,” Connor said, shaking his head. “Okay, not an actress, then. But it’s someone. Prop designer?”
“Set dresser?” Liam said.
“Hair and makeup artist?” Connor said. “You know, the wig person or whatever they’re called.”
I fiddled with the top button of my dress shirt. “It’s nothing like that. If I’m spending a lot of time in the costume shop, it’s just because I’m keeping a close eye on deadlines. There’s a lot of moving pieces as far as costumes go. Getting everything period accurate is a full-time job.”
Connor slapped his hand down on the table. “Look at that tell. He’s lying through his teeth!” Actually, I was gritting my teeth at the moment because apparently, I had a bulletproof tell when I was lying, but my asshole brothers always refused to tell me what it was .
Liam laughed. “C’mon, man. Just tell us who she is.”
My mind drifted to Sierra. To her bent over a swatch of fabric at the industrial sewing machine, pieces of her auburn hair tugging free of her clip to curl down the side of her face. I told those mental images to fuck off. My phone buzzed on the table, my one saving grace.
JILLIAN: PR flashed across the screen. I picked it up. “Hello? ”
“Hate to interrupt your brother time,” she said, “but Milli’s at it again.”
I frowned. Milli Blake ran Rumorz , one of the hottest online gossip blogs in the city. She was the same blogger who’d dubbed me the Behind-the-Scenes Beefcake after my photos with Violet went viral. If she was at it again, that couldn’t be good. I clenched my teeth.
“What now?”
“I’m sending a series of photos to your phone,” Jillian said. “These have started making the rounds in the last hour. TMZ just picked them up.”
I pulled my phone away from my ear, staring down at grainy images of myself and…
Sierra ? They must have been taken through the warehouse window when I’d taken her in to show her the old costumes.
Someone had photographed the moment when I was down on my knee, holding the cufflink up for her to inspect. Dread filled me instantly.
“It looks like?—”
“You’re proposing,” Jillian finished for me. “That’s exactly what it looks like.”
Christ .
“Milli’s started digging into the history of your secret relationship.”
My stomach dropped. History? There was no history, because there was no relationship. But there hadn’t been any actual relationship with Violet either—no teary love confessions, no tempestuous fights, no jealous rages—and that hadn’t stopped Milli from making all of that up.
The gossip rags had ridden high on her cooked-up nonsense for months. What the hell was this going to do to my reputation? And how was Sierra going to react to being thrown to the media wolves by this story?
“I’ll be right there,” I said. We needed to talk about PR crisis strategy. Now.
“See you in a bit.”
I hung up, glancing at my brothers. “Gotta go.”
“Hey,” Liam said, frowning. “Everywhere else, work takes precedence, but not here. You know that.”
“It’s about to storm,” I said, climbing out of the booth.
Liam’s face clouded over. That was the phrase we’d used as kids when things were about to go fubar.
It could mean Mom had taken a turn for the worse, getting caught up in one of her depressive episodes.
Or that a neighbor had gotten too nosy and called CPS on us.
Or that something crucial had been left undone or unsigned or unhandled because we were fucking kids and things slipped through the cracks.
It didn’t mean anything specific. It just meant something bad had happened. Something urgent. And that to deal with it, I needed my brothers to have my back. Liam immediately gave in.
“Call us later?” he asked.
I nodded, turning and rushing out the door without any more objections from them.