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“You know what’s weird? Daniel is only twenty-eight and he has his life figured out. Shouldn’t I have my life figured out by now? I should, right?”

“I bet his life isn’t figured out either. Nobody’s is. I thought mine was, and look how that turned out.”

I peered over at her. She was looking at her hand, twisting a ring around her pinky finger.

“Are you doing okay?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Define okay. Benny’s getting worse. I can’t do anything to help him. My marriage has failed, and I can’t even find a guy decent enough to have casual sex with. I’m bored and alone all the time, living in my mom’s crappy house.”

She went quiet for a moment. “I just want one of us to be happy. Why can’t we be happy?”

I sighed. “What does happy even look like, Bri? I fall in line and do what’s expected of me, give up Daniel, but I get to keep my family? Or I give it all up, become the shame of the Montgomery legacy, lose my dad, devastate my mom, but I get the boy I like? Which one is happy?”

She shrugged. “It’s easy. It’s whichever one you can’t live without.” She looked at me earnestly. “But I’ll be there for either scenario. I’ll always be there.”

I studied her face gratefully.

Bri was amazing. She didn’t deserve what happened with her ex or what was happening with her brother. She deserved everything and more.

“Maybe we should both quit Royaume,” I said.

She laughed. “Quit men too. Move in together and start a YouTube channel where we day drink and rate bread.”

I laughed and leaned over and hugged her. “I love you,” I whispered.

“I love you too,” she said with her chin over my shoulder. “But I’m still not digging the hole.”

Chapter 27

Alexis

When I’d seen Neil this morning in the kitchen, he tried to do the thing where he puts a tender knuckle to my cheek, like my counseling offer was some meaningful moment of forgiveness from me. I smacked his hand off me and grabbed the Keurig from the kitchen, marched it to my bedroom, and locked the door.

I had to come back down a minute later to shove coffee pods into the pockets of my robe, so the gesture lost a little momentum, but I think the message was pretty clear. If he wanted to talk, he could talk to me in four months after he’d jumped through all my hoops—which I half expected him to not do. But at least it would get Dad off my back long enough for me to breathe.

Now it was almost seven o’clock and dark already, and I was twenty minutes away from Wakan.

I’d lost a patient today.

I lost patients all the time. It was the nature of the work I did. But this one bothered me more than usual.

I felt eerily numb afterward, like I’d officially hit my capacity to process crappy things. The dinner with my parents, Derek’s disownment, deciding to end it with Daniel—it was all too much. I hoped the emotional disconnect lasted. I just wanted to get through my last night with Daniel in one piece and ugly cry when I got home.

I listened to Lola’s fifth album on the way down. It was sad. The whole thing reminded me of Jewel’s song “Foolish Games.” Made me wonder what Lola had been going through when she wrote it.

Sometimes I tried to line up her albums with what I could find about her online. There was a rumor she had been dating one of her backup dancers around the time she recorded this. Maybe it had to do with him.

I think Lola had a hard life. I hoped it was easier with my brother in it. I bet it was. No—I knew it was. Because I knew how much my brother must love her, and when my brother loved someone, he did it with all of himself.

I hadn’t talked to Derek since he left. There was a twelve-hour time difference with Cambodia, and he was in a rural part of the country where phone access was hard. But I could feel my brother, and I knew he could feel me. I was sending him and his wife so much love.

If Derek said Lola was worthy, she was. Simple as that. His word was all I needed. I wished it was that way for our dad, that I could just show up with someone like Daniel and Dad would know immediately that he must be exceptional if I’ve brought him home.

But my father didn’t measure people that way.

It was funny that someone as horrible as Neil could have Dad’s respect, and someone as good as Daniel never would. All because Daniel didn’t have the right education or job or family.

My brother was a cautionary tale. Not about disobeying my father. But about falling in love with someone he didn’t approve of, that made disobeying him necessary.