Page 60 of What About Us

Xander nods. “She found her birth certificate. We share a mother.”

Jesus.

I have so many questions, but I don’t know if I should ask them.

“Okay.” I push my fingers through his hair and love the way it feels so soft and silky. “Well, that’s pretty cool.”

He lifts an eyebrow.

“Not cool?”

“I’m—” He shrugs a shoulder, and I feel like a jerk.

“I should have asked you how you’re feeling about this. You can talk to me. I’m Switzerland over here. No skin in this game.”

He brushes my hair back over my shoulder, and I silently admit to myself that being this close to Xander is heaven.

Leaning against him, sitting on him, could become an addiction.

“I guess I never really thought about what my mom did after she abandoned us. I was almost four when she left.” He goes back to ghosting his fingertip over the skin of my face, and I want to purr. I want to lean into him and beg him never to stop touching me. “And I didn’t want to think about her new life. I didn’t wonder about what she was doing, and how she could just carry on and forget about the four children she left behind.”

I stay silent as he swallows hard.

“Six years after she skipped out, she had another baby. And she’s such a piece of shit that Indie wasn’t even a year old when she left her too.”

“God,” I whisper.

“I feel like a jerk for not being excited about finding out I have a long-lost sister who wasn’t so lost. I like Indie. She’s great. But fuck.”

“It doesn’t make you a shit person to have mixed feelings, Xander. Of course you do. Even if it’s not any of your fault, it’s okay to be angry and hurt. At least you know Indie isn’t an asshole. It could have been a stranger.”

“How do we know there aren’t more?” he asks, his voice so quiet. “Are more people going to show up and say that our piece-of-shit mom is also their mom?”

Well, I hadn’t thought of that.

“There’s no way to know,” I tell him honestly. “Maybe. Probably not. Do you have any idea where she is now?”

“Yeah, I know.”

My eyes widen.

“No one knows that I know. Not even my siblings. As far as they’re concerned, she left and never came back. And that’s true. She’s never been back here since she skipped out with Indie’s dad.”

“Where has she been, Xander?”

He frowns and swallows hard, and when he doesn’t answer, I lean in and hug him again, and he clings to me.

“She wanted money.” I don’t ask; it’s a statement. Because I already know.

He nods against me.

“How much did you give her?”

“Nothing.”

Surprised, I pull back and blink at him. “Really?”

“Really. She wasn’t mean like your mom. And she didn’t come to me in person. She called.”