Chapter 2
TWO
PAIGE
“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
The man I nearly take out like a linebacker gives me a dirty look. He gives me a wide berth. Oh, come on. I don’t have a disease. I’m just late.
I dart across the street in front of Picante, a fancy hotel near the ocean, and see the word Paddy’s written in bold green letters on the building.
Tucking my purse under my arm, I enter the restaurant.
The interior is stunning in an understated way.
Large dark beams crisscross the ceiling, and pale-lavender walls are accented with gold details.
The light fixtures create a soft, hazy vibe that makes my shoulders relax as soon as I walk in.
It’s a nice change from the keyed-up energy I’ve felt since I left Nate’s office.
Nate. I grin.
I look around until I spot my brother at the bar.
Hollis has a glass in his hand. His attention is focused on the large television above the alcohol bottles. It gives me a minute to gather myself.
Looking at my sole biological sibling, the only person I know who shares the same blood as me, is like looking into a mirror.
We share the same dark hair—except I bleached mine blond in a hasty moment fueled by vodka and self-pity last week.
Hollis’s eyes are the exact shade as mine.
They’re a warm brown with flecks of green that nearly turn gold under the right conditions.
He also wears a lopsided smile that I’ve always owned.
“Hey,” I say, sliding onto the barstool beside him.
He twists to me and grins. “Hey.”
We hug one another in an only slightly awkward embrace. Progress.
“Larissa didn’t come?” I ask, setting my purse on the counter.
“No. She’s at a jewelry show today with her aunt.”
“Fancy.”
He shrugs as if he doesn’t know what to say. A sheepish smile slides across his face.
“Can I get you a drink?” A woman with a tag bearing the name Gina smiles at me. “A sandwich?”
“Um, yeah.” I grab the menu she set in front of me and scan it quickly. “Cherry Coke and a burger for me. No veggies. Just meat, cheese, and the bun. Please.”
“I’ll take the same,” Hollis says.
Gina laughs. “Easy enough. I’ll be right back with two Cherry Cokes.” She winks at Hollis before scurrying off to put in our order.
I sink back in the leather chair and exhale, releasing more into the world than just carbon dioxide. The stress from the morning and the eviction —all dissipate from my body.
The silence between us is comfortable. It hasn’t always been so easy since he walked into The Gold Room a month ago—when I thought I was seeing a ghost. But we’re working on it slowly.
I’ve thought about my big brother every day since we were separated by Child Protective Services.
Our case workers arranged a very brief visit, and at the time, I had no idea it would be the last time I saw him for nearly ten years.
I’ve carried around his smile and penchant for music my entire life, wondering what happened to him.
“How are you?” I ask. “What have you been up to?”
“Same shit, different day. I’m heading to Nashville this weekend with Coy to try to nail down a couple of songs for his new album.”
I laugh. “I still can’t believe you write music for Kelvin McCoy—the biggest name in country music. That’s so cool.”
He grins. “It is pretty cool.” A little laugh escapes him. “I’m really lucky that Larissa’s family and I get along so well.”
“My mother is determined to make you love her like Larissa’s family loves you,” I say with a laugh. “You’ve been warned.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Every time I talk to her, she pesters me about when the two of you will get to meet, and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost part of my inheritance for making her wait.”
Hollis folds his hand on the bar top. “She sounds great.”
“She is. They all are. They’re just … a lot. Lots of big personalities and they can swamp you if you don’t watch it.”
“Was that hard for you? Not getting swamped by them?”
I take a deep breath. I hate talking about this. Lying would be an option that would definitely make me come across as a better human. But the act of lying would make me a shitty person, so I don’t have much of a choice but to tell the truth and hope it comes out right.
“I can’t say it without sounding like a brat.”
He lowers his chin and looks into my eyes. “Try me.”
I feel heat in the apples of my cheeks.
“Look, I understand how lucky I am to have been adopted by the Carmichaels. Okay? I get it. I went from being invisible and ignored in foster care to chaos and candy on the beach. They’re absolutely wonderful. All of them.”
“But?”
I sigh, taking my drink from Gina and then thanking her.
“It wasn’t that it was hard getting swamped.
It was more about my …” I restart. “I had a hard time understanding that I belonged there. It took me a long time. Years. I struggle with it now some days, if I’m being honest. I don’t look like them.
I don’t like the same foods they like. I’m not doing a marathon on Thanksgiving morning, or any other day if we’re being honest, and I never met my grandma Carmichael, who was like the patron saint of fucking sunshine, I guess. ”
He chuckles.
“Clearly, I didn’t get that DNA.” I grin. “It can be hard. And it makes me feel like a jerk, and then I get sweaty about it, and then I need space because who wants to feel like a sweaty jerk in front of the people who shouldn’t make you feel that way to start with?”
Hollis brings his glass to his lips. “Punctuation is your friend.”
I snort.
My brother’s attention is taken away by the television—or that’s what it seems. In reality, I think he’s just trying to process what I’ve said and figure out how to respond. This is something I’ve learned about Hollis. He’s a quiet processor. I appreciate it.
I twirl my straw around my glass and think about my admission too. It’s the truth. All of it. But I’ve never vocalized it to anyone. I don’t think I’ve ever even said it out loud.
I wanted nothing more growing up than to find a family. Then I did, and I just wanted to be one of them. Desperately. I wanted to fit in somewhere.
What I didn’t want?
I didn’t want to be the dark-haired little girl who everyone judged with hefty skepticism as I walked with my fair-haired family down the beach.
I resented my curvy build that stuck out in family photos.
I also seriously hated that I couldn’t answer what my heritage was in school or if my family had any medical conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, or kidney disease.
I don’t know, Doc. The last thing I knew, I was being carted off from school in a white van, and my parents were sent to the pokey for manufacturing methamphetamine in our basement. Could be some issues there, clearly.
Gina sets our plates in front of us and asks if we need anything else. We politely decline.
“You know,” Hollis says, taking a napkin and folding it onto his lap. “I felt just like you do until I met Larissa.”
“So she fixed you?” I pick up a fry. “She have any brothers?”
He grins. “No. She didn’t fix me, smart-ass. She just made me look at things differently. Before her, I thought there wasn’t a place for me. I had no one, right? And then she came along, and I realized that I belong where I say I belong.”
Deep.
I blink twice and avoid discussing how that might apply to me … or not. “And what about the brothers?”
“No brothers.” He laughs, bringing his burger to his mouth. “You’re funny.”
I bite off the end of my fry. “I guess when God was handing out brothers, he gave them all to me.”
Hollis swallows and then takes a sip of his drink. I ignore the impending question by squirting a heavy dose of ketchup onto my plate in the shape of a moon.
“You’ve always done that, huh?” He motions toward the ketchup design. “I have memories of you doing that.”
My heart warms that he remembers. You don’t realize you’ve missed someone knowing things about you until someone does.
“Tell me about your brothers,” he says. “You’ve not said a lot about them.”
I drag a fry through the ketchup. “They’re good guys. They’re all older than me, but we’re pretty close. We have a siblings text group that gets a little wild.”
He smiles.
“I want to throttle Banks sometimes, but what can you do?” I shrug and eat another fry.
“Is he the one you’re closest to?”
“Yeah. He’s a turd,” I say, laughing. “He always said that Mom and Dad bought me because they couldn’t have a girl.
We’d pass this little shop in town with this big pink-and-yellow sign out front.
I think they sell surfboards or something.
Anyway, every time we’d pass it growing up, Banks would whisper, ‘Look, it’s the store where Mom bought you. She still has the receipt.’”
A shadow passes over Hollis’s face. “Sounds like an asshole.”
“He was kidding,” I say, picking up another fry. “I mean, he is kind of an asshole, but he broke a guy’s nose for me once, so I can’t talk too much shit about him.”
Hollis considers this as he takes another bite of his burger.
We eat in comfortable silence, both of us getting used to the energy of the other. It’s a bit disarming how easy it is to be around him, and a part of me wonders if that’s just our sibling dynamic. Whatever it is, I’m thankful.
“Oh,” I say, patting my mouth with a napkin. “I got evicted today.”
His head whips to mine. “Really? Do you need a place to stay? Do you need money?”
“No. No, no, no. Nothing like that. I paid my rent to my friend, but she did not pay the landlord. It’s a huge mess. All I know is that I had to move out today or …” I think of the landlord’s threats. “I had to move out today.”
“Are you sure? Because Larissa and I have two extra bedrooms, and we’d love to have you stay with us. It would give me someone to shoot the shit with when she’s out shopping for organic vegetables.”
I wink at him. “That sounds fun.”
“Harlee—I mean, Paige.” He winces. “I’m sorry. That’s still a hard one for me.”
I take a deep breath and look at him. No one has called me Harlee in forever—just Hollis when we met a few weeks ago in The Gold Room. That was before he knew that I go by Paige now.
“It’s fine,” I say. “You can call me whatever you want.”
“Can I ask you a question about that?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you change it? Or did your parents change it without asking you?” He frowns. “Am I asking too many questions?”
“No, of course not. Mom asked when we were going through the adoption process because I, uh, didn’t really like my name. I mean, what kid doesn’t want to change their name?”
I laugh like it’s no big deal. Hollis sees right through my bullshit but lets it go.
“Right,” he says, nodding. “Makes sense.”
“Yeah. So I asked if I could change it. Paige was the name of Dad’s mom—you know, The Patron Saint of Sunshine.”
Hollis laughs.
“And I thought it was a nice name.” And that they might love me more if I was named after someone they love. “But back to needing a place to stay. I don’t. I have it covered. I’m staying with my boss, Nate.”
“Nate Hughes? From The Gold Room?”
“Yup.” The p pops as it falls from my lips. “I’m gonna stay there until I find a place.”
Hollis forces a smile. “You think that’s a good plan?”
“Yeah. I mean, we flirt around, but it’s all fun and games. He’s literally one of my best friends, which is probably why I can flirt with him like I do. It’s safe.”
He narrows his eyes. “So it’s all good?”
“I’m doing it, aren’t I?”
We sit shoulder to shoulder, yet it’s as if a giant crevasse plunges between us.
I’ve always hated having to justify myself to my brothers as if they didn’t believe I was capable of making good decisions on my own. I wonder if Hollis and I would’ve had the same relationship. Would he be the older brother who speaks, and I, as the younger sibling, listens? I think so.
Well, maybe. My other brothers speak, and I don’t really listen to them either.
Hollis finally acquiesces and grins. “Have you always been this headstrong, or is this a new thing?”
“Oh, it’s one of my most consistent traits.” I laugh. “I used to imagine that it was a biological trait. I really clung to that in a weird way.”
“You might be right. Our mom was really hardheaded. That or she was just totally negligent.”
My heart clenches. “Well, being that she was cooking meth in our basement, maybe a little of both.”
“You’re probably right.” He taps his fingers against the counter. “Do you remember sleeping with that big dog we had?”
“I do. I have this weird memory of a black dog between us and being cold. I remember lying in bed and watching our breath billow into the air.”
“You know, I still can’t be cold when I sleep. It drives Larissa nuts. I need it to practically be a sauna, or I just lay there in a pit of anxiety.”
My eyes go wide. “Me too!”
He smiles. “Riss grew up very differently than we did. I have a hard time talking to her about some of the wild shit we experienced because she could never get it. I swear she thinks I’m making some of this up.” He chuckles. “Some of those stories do sound fabricated.”
“I get it.” I lean back in my chair. “When the Carmichaels adopted me, my new life felt like a fairy tale. I mean, they sat down to dinner. They read books at bedtime. There was food in the fridge.”
Hollis nods as if remembering is hard.
“Can I get the two of you anything else?” Gina asks. “More to drink? Dessert?”
I look at my brother. The look on his face says the memories ruined his appetite too.
“I’m good,” I say. “You?”
“I think we’re finished.” He fishes a credit card from his wallet. “Here you go.”
Once Gina is out of earshot, I sigh. “You didn’t have to pay for my food.”
All I get is a look not to push. So I push.
“I mean it,” I say. “I’m getting yours next time.”
Gina brings the receipt. Hollis adds a tip, signs it, and then slips his card back into his wallet.
We get up and head outside. The air is warm and smells like the sea.
“You need a ride?” he asks.
“No. My car is in the Picante parking lot, but thanks.”
He nods. “Where are you headed now?”
Good question.
I glance down the street at all the little shops and people moseying along the sidewalks. “I think I’m going to run by Kinsley’s for a while before I go to Nate’s for the night.”
He draws me into a quick hug. When he pulls away, there’s a hint of concern in his eyes.
“You can call me anytime. For anything. I want you to. Okay?” he asks.
I smile at him. “Okay. Call me when you get back in town, and we’ll do something together.”
“I’d like that.” He walks backward down the sidewalk. “Be safe.”
“Always.”
After a little wave, I start back to my car.
Stay safe, big brother. I’d hate to lose you again.