by Sara Whitney
Trip led the way into the lobby of the building, and they boarded the elevator for their parents’ ninth-floor apartment. Aiden knocked on the door, which was as undecorated as the rest of the hall, and was reminded of Thea’s joy over ditching rental life for home ownership.
He missed her. God, when had she become central enough that he missed her when she wasn’t around?
“My boys!” Gloria threw the door open and pulled them into a hug that Aiden sank into. “You’re here!” She waved her hand and pushed them toward the kitchen table. “I just pulled a breakfast casserole out of the oven. Sit and eat.”
Aiden caught Trip’s eye, and they exchanged quick, suppressed smiles as they followed her to the table.
“Thanks.” Aiden accepted a plate with sliced melons positioned next to a wedge of egg, ham, and cheese giving off the most delicious breakfast-y steam. “Where’s Dad?”
“Asleep. He had an appointment yesterday, and that always wears him out.”
Speaking of worn out. Their mother’s voice sounded tired, and she looked thinner than he remembered ever seeing her, although her smile was still as warm.
“You’re worn out too,” he said. “We should be here helping you. We should—”
“You absolutely should not.” Steel entered her tone. “You’re running the business, and I’m sure that’s hard enough with your dad and me gone.” Her eyes traveled to the window, which framed a square of bright blue Chicago sky. “Believe it or not, I like it here. We’re close to a park, and I’ve found a nice group of retirees to walk with. Your dad comes with me on his good days. If not, we have home health care.”
“Really? Dad joined a senior walking group?” Trip asked.
She tossed her head back in a laugh. “He grumbles the whole time. But Chicago’s been… interesting. How often does someone like me retire and move to the city? We’ve met so many people.” Her hopeful gaze turned toward Aiden. “Speaking of people, how’s Thea?”
Trip scoffed before he could answer, and Aiden bristled immediately. “You got something to say?”
“Yeah. It’s bullshit.” He lifted his chin as if daring his brother to contradict him.
“Language!” But Gloria zeroed right back in on Aiden. “Why is it bullshit?”
“It’s not,” he said, praying this would end the subject. But Trip scoffed again, louder this time, and Aiden’s temper flared. “What’s your problem with Thea?”
“It’s not with her, it’s with you.” He crossed his arms over his chest with a glare, and Aiden’s overtaxed patience finally snapped.
“And what the fuck is your problem with me?” Aiden tossed his fork down and lurched to his feet, too furious with his brother to control his tone.
“Boys! Knock it off.” Their mother’s voice cracked through the apartment. She pointed a finger at her firstborn. “You, sit down.”
Aiden dropped to his seat but didn’t look away from his brother’s red, angry face.
“And you.” Gloria addressed her second-born now. “Apologize.”
“But I—”
“Apologize.”
Trip’s flush reddened, and he glared down at the remains of breakfast on his plate. “Sorry.” He sounded exactly like the sulky twelve-year-old Aiden remembered.
“What is going on with you two?”
Aiden crumpled up his napkin, tempted to shove food into his mouth to keep from having to reply.
But his mom wasn’t new to the parenting thing, because she leveled a hard look at him, then Trip. “I bribed you both with a perfectly good trough of food. Now spill.”
Aiden sighed and pushed the plate away. “You’ll have to ask him.”
But Trip just glared down and said nothing.
“I don’t know what happened.” Gloria’s gaze bounced between the two of them. “You used to be friends. Are you jealous of your brother, Trip? Is it the attention he gets from all those women?”
“Jesus,” Aiden muttered.
Trip groaned loudly. “No! God! Look, it’s—”
Whatever Trip was about to say ended with the sound of a shuffle-thump moving down the hall. “Gloria, where’s my—”
Rudy entered the kitchen, and for a moment he stared blankly at the three people around the table. Then his face split into an enormous grin. “Boys! I didn’t know you were coming!”
He moved forward, and Aiden and Trip both stood to hug him. If he’d thought his mother looked thinner, that was nothing compared to his dad, who seemed diminished somehow in his plaid shirt and khakis. But his jaw was clean-shaven, his hair was neatly brushed, and his face glowed with excitement at sitting down to breakfast with his family.
“Did I know they were coming?” he asked Gloria.
The corners of her mouth dropped, but she nodded firmly. “I mentioned it. But it’s okay. They’re here now.”
“They’re here now,” he repeated.
Gloria stood to fill a plate and set it in front of him with a quick kiss on the head. He picked up his fork and asked, “How’s the work on the Johnsons’ going?” Then he set the fork down, and the lines in his forehead deepened. “No. Not the Johnsons. The… the pharmacy. The Santiagos.”
Relief settled palpably over the table, and it felt like he, Trip, and their mom all exhaled in unison.
“It’s good,” Trip said. “We’re close to wrapping up.” He nodded toward Aiden. “They’re even letting this guy come around now.”
Trip met his eyes, and Aiden inclined his head slightly. Here was Trip’s true apology.
Rudy just harrumphed. “Shouldn’t have kept him from coming around in the first place. Ridiculous.”
His throat tightened. “Thanks, Dad.” He had to clear it before he could speak again. “But the work’s looking great. Trip oversaw a whole redesign of their lighting for the work area.”
That spun the conversation off in a new direction about light bulb frequency spectrum, which could captivate his dad and brother for days. While those two debated LEDs versus fluorescents, his mom pulled him aside.
“The treatment’s going well so far,” she said quietly. “The clinical trial is just getting underway. The doctors working with him have been wonderful. They have him following a medication regime along with exercise and mental acuity games. He has more good days than bad up here.”
“That’s great, Mom.” He gripped her hand as one layer of worry peeled off his soul.
She squeezed his hand back, her smile fading again. “The thing is, it’s made us both reevaluate things. And it’s time for us to officially step away from the company. You and Trip, the business is yours now. Permanently.”
The words filtered through his brain, a truth he’d known was coming even as he dreaded hearing it. “Okay.” He exhaled hard. “Okay.”
“That means you two need to fix this.” She looked meaningfully at where Trip was patiently listening to Rudy explain about blue light spectrum versus yellow light spectrum, a topic Trip was already well-versed in.
“I wish I knew how.” He shrugged helplessly. “But we don’t exactly talk about our feelings.”
“Is it because you went to college and he didn’t?” Gloria laced her fingers together, and the gesture reminded him of Thea. “He never enjoyed school, so I never pushed it on him, but maybe I should have. Or is it—”
“Mom.” He cut her off. “I love you, but don’t do this. We’ll figure it out. We both want the business to succeed.”
When they’d all finished their meal, Aiden and Trip cleaned up the dishes while their mother grabbed a huge pillbox and fished out a handful of meds for their father to swallow. Afterward, she pulled Trip out the door to walk with her to the Garden of the Phoenix, which had apparently become her favorite park in the city. Aiden recognized it for what it was: a ploy to let him talk shop with his dad as he prepared to officially take over the business Rudy had built from the ground up.
“Mom says you’re both liking it here,” Aiden said as the two of them settled into th
e small living room.
Unlike his parents’ Beaucoeur home, this space was stark and uncluttered, with only one framed photo resting on a side table as decoration. It was the last church directory picture they’d taken together, when he and Trip were both teenagers who’d been crammed into suits and forced to smile awkwardly at the camera early on a long-ago Sunday morning. For some reason his mother loved it.
“Chicago’s different,” his dad grumbled. “But it’s not all bad.”
He looked closely at Rudy’s face and saw focus and clarity in his eyes. Thank God for that at least. “Mom says you’re officially retiring?”
Rudy worked his mouth back and forth before he spoke. “Yeah. It’s time. You boys’ll do fine.” He glanced at the framed picture, and a fond smile ghosted across his features. “More than fine.”
Aiden blinked. From his taciturn father, that was sky-high praise. “Do you want an update on any more of the jobs we have going?”
But Rudy just waved him off. “Nah. Perks of retirement. Not having to give a damn about cost overruns.”
Aiden chuckled because yes, cost overruns had become the bane of his existence.
Then Rudy shocked the hell out of him by saying, “So you’re seeing someone.”
He stiffened. He had never, not once, discussed a woman with his father. In fact, his dad had made it clear years ago that he’d given up on his oldest son settling down, which pretty well closed the book on conversations about his personal life. Back then, Aiden had considered it yet more evidence that the whole world saw how fundamentally unsuited he was for anything deeper than sex. But now Rudy was opening the door for a relationship talk—and just when he felt the least prepared to handle it.
“I am,” he said haltingly.
“And you like this girl?”
Yes. She’s wonderful. She’s funny and vibrant and adorable when she’s nervous. She makes me laugh and she kisses like a dream. And I’m a coward who’s been avoiding her for days.
The torrent of words stalled on his tongue. They were all true, and they terrified him. His entire adulthood proved that he wasn’t the guy a woman like Thea could rely on. Yet at the same time, he missed her touch as much as he missed her laughter. But in the end, all he could bring himself to say was “I like her a lot.”
And those five words were enough to conjure a paternal smile that filled the small apartment where his parents were carving out a new life for themselves.
“Good. That’s good. Your mother and I know how happy you could make the right girl.” His father looked at him and asked, “Do you make her happy?”
Aiden didn’t even have to think about it. “I do.” Or he had, anyway, last weekend. And he wanted to keep making her happy for far longer than that. He just wasn’t sure he knew how.
Twenty-One
Hours later, Aiden and Trip hugged their parents goodbye with a promise to call once they’d made it home safely, then boarded the elevator in silence. They didn’t make it more than two floors before Trip sighed.
“We should’ve visited earlier.”
Aiden glanced over at him, surprised that his brother was voluntarily making conversation. “We really should have. Let’s try to come back soon. Maybe bring Ash next time?” He held his breath, unsure if he’d overstepped by bringing up a touchy subject. But Trip just nodded.
“Yeah. She’d probably love Mom’s Phoenix park.” He stared hard at the ground as he said it, as if the idea needed deep internal scrutiny of some sort. They didn’t talk again until they were on the interstate heading south, and Aiden took advantage of the possible cessation of brotherly hostility to broach the subject of their parents’ retirement.
“Did Mom talk to you about her and Dad’s decision?”
Trip sagged back against the seat, his skull hitting the headrest. “She filled me in.” His brother’s voice held the same resignation that Aiden was grappling with. “I guess we all knew it was coming.”
“Sooner than we ever expected though.”
Trip offered him a half smile. “At least it won’t be hard finding a replacement for Mom.” When Aiden looked at him curiously, he said, “Your girlfriend, dude. She kicks ass at it. We should hire her full time.”
Aiden almost swerved onto the shoulder as the idea took hold and expanded in his brain. How had he not seen it? Thea was cheerfully competent at everything he’d seen her do. She fixed fake kitchen displays and talked down pissed-off clients and God only knew what else was in her arsenal of skills and her magic purse. For thirty years, their mother had ruled the company with warmth and a firm hand, and Thea would be an amazing replacement to take them into the next thirty years.
One problem though.
“It’s not that easy,” Aiden said. “For one thing, we’re not…”
Trip raised his brows. “Not really dating?”
Aiden’s hands clenched around the steering wheel. “Fine. You’re right.”
“Shocker,” Trip said flatly, but he didn’t sound pissed this time, just amused.
It gave Aiden the push he needed to have an honest conversation with his brother about his personal life. “It started off as a way to help each other out, but now it’s… complicated.”
Trip gave a surprised grunt. “Complicated? Didn’t think you did complicated.”
“I don’t,” he snapped, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “So yeah, if she was just some woman, I’d say we should hire her in a heartbeat. But she’s… I mean, we’re not…”
They weren’t actually dating. They weren’t getting married. And that meant that once they were back to being friends, he’d have to see Thea every day at the job. Eventually he’d have to watch her leave work to go out with some other guy, maybe someday even go home to a family that didn’t include him.
The idea was intolerable, and the more he thought about it, the heavier it settled on his chest. Because the truth was, he was tired. Tired of being the guy who was always alone. Not alone on Saturday nights, because that was easy enough for him to fix, but alone when it counted. Alone on lazy Sunday mornings. Alone at the family dinner table. The kind of alone that made him look at the amazing woman in his life and wonder if she could fill the hole in the center of his chest. That hole had grown bigger with each year that he told himself he didn’t have any kind of forever to offer another person. Until Thea.
She made him want things he didn’t think he was capable of. Things he’d insisted to his family he didn’t want. Things that he’d shown the world he didn’t care about. And once he’d shut down the idea of ever having those soft forever feelings, the world had responded by expecting nothing more of him. He’d drifted along, happy to comply, until Thea had shocked the hell out of him by making him question whether he could let himself want something other than the life he’d been living.
And that was fucking terrifying. No wonder he’d run in the other direction this week.
In the end, all that was way too much to say to Trip, so he stuck with a terse, “I’m not sure hiring Thea would be the best idea.” He wasn’t even sure she was speaking to him right now, to be honest. Only a complete asshole would blow her off all week because his insides were all tangled up every time he thought about her smile.
Trip grumbled, “Yeah, well, I don’t think me answering phones is the best idea either.”
“We agree on that.”
His brother snorted in amusement, then sobered immediately and leaned forward to flip the air-conditioning vent open and closed a few times before blurting out, “Dammit, I’m sorry, okay?”
Aiden flicked a surprised glance at him. “For what?”
“I just”—he exhaled hard—“I owe you an apology. About everything. And I’m sorry.”
Heavy silence descended on the truck cab until Aiden said, “Did Mom put you up to this?”
“Kind of.” Trip had moved on to spinning his phone nervously between his fingers. “But she’s right. We can’t run the business with me making shitty comments about you
all day.”
Months of pent-up hurt and anger climbed up Aiden’s throat, but he stuffed it down and asked as calmly as he could, “I’ve gotta know: what the hell did I do to make you so goddamn pissy all the time?”
Trip dropped his phone in his lap and hardened his jaw. For a second, he looked like he wasn’t going to answer, but he finally unclenched enough to say, “It’s Ash, all right? She… she wants me to be more like you.”
“She what?” Aiden looked over at him in horror, grateful that they were finally past the worst of the Chicago congestion so he could focus on the conversation without fear of plowing into any stop-and-start traffic. He had no idea how marriage actually worked, but comparing your husband to your brother-in-law didn’t seem like a great sign. “She doesn’t, um…”
He was too appalled to even finish the sentence, but thankfully Trip gave an emphatic shake of his head.
“No. God no. She always says she married the hotter Murdoch brother.”
Trip’s face softened then, and the satisfied little smile that crossed his face belonged to a man who was thoroughly besotted with his woman. Aiden was starting to understand what that felt like. “Poor Ash,” he quipped. “She’s wrong, but I’m glad she loves you anyway.”
That brought out a full-blown guffaw from his brother, and Aiden laughed right along with him before Trip sobered.
“No, it’s not like that. But she says we’re in a rut. Wishes we did more things.” The tension was back in Trip’s shoulders. “‘Aiden’s in a band, Aiden went on that trip to Jamaica. Aiden’s always meeting up with his friends.’ She wants me to be more adventurous.”
“Huh.” Aiden was at a loss. Trip had been stomping around pissed for months because his wife wanted more date nights? “I’m actually pretty boring when it comes right down to it.”
“I know that, asshole,” Trip said immediately, but there was no anger behind the words. “And yeah, we could probably go out more. But it… it wasn’t just that.” His hands clenched and released before he continued in a rush of words. “Things with Dad were getting shittier and shittier, and I knew you were gonna be the boss at work sooner rather than later, so when Ash started bringing you up at home too? It was just a whole fucking lot of the Adonis show, all right?”
