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And he was his brother.
The curse of can’t live without ‘em and all that.
Instead of retorting something he’d definitely regret, he flicked open his phone and distracted himself with a few mindless minutes of browsing the black void of social media while he calmed the hell down. Since his company took off in a big way and people knew who he was, he had an account under a fake name that was kept ultra-private with only his close friends and family on there. He did it just because his mom had broken down almost a year back and begged him to make one, just so his grandma and grandpa in Georgia could keep in touch. He didn’t do calls and he was admittedly shitty at personal emails, so he kind of got her point. He couldn’t stand to see his mom crying, so he’d given in. Let her make it for him.
He rarely used it.
Correction.
He rarely used it because his mom had gone and done the craziest thing and added Sydney Underhill to it, along with most of his old high school and college friends that he was still close with.
His mom didn’t know what happened with him and Syd, so he could excuse her for that. Syd never reached out to him. Never even acknowledged he was on her friends list other than accepting the request in the first place. Probably because it was the token nice girl thing to do and even though she’d moved on with her life and moved away after he spouted off that bunch of nonsense about loving her and wanting to marry her one day, when they were both adult enough to do it, she was still nice.
Probably because to her, he’d always be that little kid she held after he’d bombed off the slide. Her geeky friend. Her roommate. A guy who was so deep in the friend’s zone, it wasn’t even funny.
Because yeah, it was definitely not funny what happened.
It ruined everything.
She’d moved away the next damn morning, just packed the most important things in her car and left. Without a word.
Ten years, one month, and six days ago.
He’d kept track. Because he was entirely, utterly, pathetic.
Jesse kept mindlessly scrolling, talking himself down from smashing his fist into his brother’s face, which would have been about the tenth time that month. His mom didn’t need another headache or a bloody nose to clean up, so he got himself the freaking heck under control.
His thumb kept flipping, moving that screen up, his eyes seeing none of it, until he stopped, because he’d stop every single time he saw her name. Sydney Underhill.
It was the large S that caught his eyes, but then he scanned the rest of what she’d written.
His stomach bottomed out. The world stopped. Time stopped. Everything stopped.
“Looks like you’re in luck,” he found himself saying woodenly into the room, just putting those impossible words out there because they bubbled up inside of him and erupted from his throat before he could take them back. “Looks like I’m getting married.”
CHAPTER 2
Sydney
The infuriating pounding on her door could only mean one thing.
Her mother.
Which, after celebrating her thirty-second birthday in complete style with her friends, even if it was a Thursday night and they showed up at her apartment unannounced and took her out and got her completely hammered at a really nice restaurant on really expensive drinks that they splurged for even though they didn’t have the money, was something she couldn’t deal with.
Sydney had called in sick to work. No one there knew it was her birthday the night before, so she had no doubt she’d get away with the flu she claimed to have.
Her aching head, sloshing stomach, elevated pulse, and the saliva that flooded her mouth like a warning every single time she moved an inch on her bed certainly felt like a bad flu. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever drunk so much. Or been so hung over.
Maybe it was just that she didn’t really drink anymore. Other than a glass of wine here and there, mostly so that she could stomach the terrible dates she went on, she didn’t touch anything more than tea.
Her best friend, Jasmine, rolled up to her apartment at eight the night before. Sydney remembered that much. She’d brought an entire army of their friends with her. Or at least, they were Jasmine’s friends, so that was close enough.
She couldn’t let her wallow in self-pity on her birthday. It had been all of a few months since she’d found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her. For like, the entire six months that they’d gone out. She’d gone over to his place to surprise him. There wasn’t anyone there with him, but by the time she hit the bed with Blane, the lights were still on and she’d found some sketchy red hairs in the bed that clearly didn’t belong to either of them.
