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Now, I’m constantly calling, checking in, and making sure they’re alive and, at the very least, eating. Archer groans, Lucas laughs me off, and Everett ignores my calls like I’m a meddling parent—but we’re all we have left, and it doesn’t matter how far apart we may grow, I’ll never give up on them.
Kendricks never quit.
It was our family motto until that fateful day.
Cayce snaps me back to whatever he’s saying. “I know this is the last thing you want to deal with, today of all days…”
The anniversary of our parents’ deaths? Guess he’s right about that.
“Shit. The will executor is calling me again,” he says. “Can I call you right back?”
“Yeah, you do that. And while you’re at it, tell her I don’t care what she does with it. I’m not interested.”
I hang up, but Cayce’s call nags at me, and as I make my way up the elevator to Lucas’s penthouse, I filter through memories of our parents. The ones I can still picture in my mind’s eye, though time has made them blurry.
I rarely match my mom’s compassion and patience with my brothers, or anyone for that matter, but I like to think she’d be proud of me—of us.
Still, it doesn’t stop the unease that’s been creeping up lately. As if having all the money in the world doesn’t matter anymore. We can go anywhere and do anything we want—and we have—but we’re all inexplicably restless.
Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis, but I wake daily with this sinking pit of anxiety that something far beyond my control is happening. Like the universe as we know it is closing in on us, and we’re spiraling out of control.
“Lucas. Open up, you fucking asshole,” I say, pounding on the metal door when I reach my brother’s apartment. I’m met with an eerie silence that makes my skin twitch. “You can’t avoid your responsibilities forever.”
When I press my ear to the door and hear a glass bottle roll across the floor, my stomach bottoms out. I reach inside my pocket for my wallet, grab the keycard he had made for each of us, and quickly wave it in front of the sensor.
Two sensations hit my nervous system at once: panic over the music sounding from the entertainment center across the room, and relief that he’s alive.
Out cold on the sofa, but alive, nonetheless.
The enormous living area smells like bad decisions and desperation as I step over clusters of beer bottles to pause the piano melody playing from the speaker. “Mom and Dad Playlist” scrolls idly across his phone that sits on the shelf to my right.
Lucas’s long legs are sprawled half off the cushions, with one arm slung over his face. He must have put this on before passing out, and my irritation with him softens by a fraction.
I haven’t been able to listen to that song since they died, but that doesn’t stop an assault of raw memories of them constantly dancing to it from evading my head space.
Gardening, art, or music—if it allowed Mom’s creativity to roam, it had her undivided attention. Outside of raising us while Dad worked as a technical engineer for one of the highest-grossing airlines in the country, Mom’s many hobbies kept her heart full, our house happy, and each of us loving her all the more.
I open the curtains of the nearest window, then backtrack to kick his hand, still lying between two empty wine bottles. “Wake up, Lucas.”
He startles upright. “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
Naked, except for half of a thin blanket covering his waist, he blinks away his alcohol-induced sleep with a low groan. “Rowan? What’s going on?”
“You, clearly not doing your job, that’s what.”
Unnaturally pale, with deep circles under his eyes, he shades his gaze from the light. “Do me a solid and close those curtains, will ya?”
“You’re a real prick, you know that?”
“Ugh.” After scrubbing a hand down his face, he cocks his head. “Of course you’re here to shout at me.”
When I simply cross my arms, giving him a stern look, he huffs a weak laugh.
I don’t know how he does it. Looking half alive with his sandy brown hair completely disheveled, he still manages to look like a cover model. Which is fitting, considering he should’ve been on a plane in preparation for a cover shoot over an hour ago.
“Are you drunk at twelve-forty-five in the afternoon?”
“To be fair, I’ve been drunk since twelve-forty-five yesterday afternoon.”
