Page 89 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Somebody you loved.” She let it sit. Let the silence do the work. But not for very long. “So…”

“So what?”

“So, call Chris.”

I looked at her like she’d suggested I eat a hippopotamus for Christmas.

Chris. My oldest brother. Mustangs quarterback, the actual one, the one I’d learned everything from and spent my whole life half a field behind. Chris, who had married Trixie Moore, and who had, once upon a time, in a way everybody in the family somehow knew, started a fake relationship with the love of his life and ended up so far past the edge of it that he built his whole existence on the other side.

If anybody in the world had stood exactly where I was standing, in love and calling it a strategy, it was Chris.

“He’ll be insufferable,” I said.

“He’ll be insufferable and right,” Jules said, “which I believe is the family specialty.” She kissed my cheek, somehow the oldest person in the hallway. “Dad wants to meet Clover up in the box, by the way. I already texted her. Keep up.”

She and Fox peeled off toward the box and left me standing in the hall with a win, a noose with a date on it, a sister who’d cracked me open and Kinsugid me back together.

I got dressed. I did not call Chris.

I stood at my locker and looked at his name on the screen for longer than a grown man should, and then I put the phone in my pocket, because somewhere upstairs Clover was about to walk into a family box to meet my father, the one man in my life I’d spent twenty-five years certain didn’t see me, and the only thing in the world I wanted to do more than not call my brother was be standing next to her when she did.

I’d call Chris.

Tomorrow. Probably.

That “probably” was going to cost me. I just didn’t know the exchange rate yet.

WE ALL BLEED GREEN

CLOVER

Ihad been in The Rhinehaus a couple of months, paid rent via their online portal, and hadn’t had any reason to visit the first floor management office. I’d never met, complained, or even messaged with the actual landlord. Hopefully he wasn’t some slum lord. Probably just some rich investor.

The button for the penthouse needed a key fob. Isak had a key fob.

“You live in the penthouse,” I said, as the doors closed and the car kept going up past my floor, past the floors I knew, into the part of the building I’d assumed belonged to some hedge fund person who collected wine.

“I live in the penthouse,” he agreed, like it was a normal sentence and not a small earthquake.

“Of my building.”

“Yep.” Something flickered across his face, fast, gone before I could name it.

Right now it didn’t matter. I was a woman in a good dress going up to have dinner with both sets of parents and I did not have the bandwidth to interrogate an elevator. “Is the penthouse all warehousy? Do you even have walls? Furniture? Maybe we should go out.”

My brothers had really nice apartments with their professional football player money too, and all the furniture they had was to hold their enormous televisions.

“It’s a brewery. You live in a brewery.”

“I live in a former brewery, which is different, it has been thoroughly de-beered.” The doors opened. “Come on before Fox tells your father the story about the goose. There’s a goose story. He’s been saving it.”

And then I stopped interrogating anything, because I walked into the most beautiful home I had ever stood inside, and it had my mother in it.

It was all warm brick and enormous windows holding the whole lit-up river, and it should have been a cold rich-man box, and it wasn’t, because somebody actually lived here.

There was a cat tree by the window that cost more than my car.

There was a wall of motorcycle helmets, dozens of them, arranged with a care that was either very cool or very alarming and I genuinely could not decide.