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“Okay.” He walked from the room, his shirt off, like he didn’t know the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Maybe he just didn’t care.
Max never came back to bed.
His mother’s party was everything I’d imagined it was going to be. We walked through the door, and everyone in the house seemed to yellhelloall at once. I smiled, and Max didn’t. In fact, he’d been tense all day.
I’d wondered if he was going to make an effort to be pleasant with his family, and the answer turned out to be sort of no. He was nice to his parents, but that was about it. His siblings got grunts as answers when they pulled him into hugs, but they pretended not to notice he was being rude. They did that for me too. Big hugs. Everyone in the whole house—and there were so many of them, I lost count—hugged me.
Except for his sister Trina. She barely said hello and then turned her back on me like I wasn’t even there.
It hurt, since I’d decided to pretend for the afternoon that I belonged there, and then I remembered that she had been the one living with Max when it had all gone sour with Hayley’s. Yep. I was never going to be her favorite person. Her husband, whose name I was pretty sure was Hal, was very friendly, and I liked her daughters, who were three and one.
In fact, I spent a lot of the time before dinner with a tiara on my head, playing with the children who had decided I was new, sparkly, and exactly who they should be spending all their time with. Their parents would come in and out, sit with us, and make small talk. Max looked the most like his brother David, but the whole family had a familial look that really worked for all of them.
Eventually, the kids ran off to play outside in the snow that had started coming down. A dusting, they were calling it. I didn’tknow what that meant to Mainers, as they called themselves. I followed noise toward the large living room.
But I stopped outside his father’s office when I heard Max’s voice.
“What is it that you want?” He sounded annoyed. I was glad he wasn’t talking to me like that.
“I just don’t know what you’re trying to prove by bringing that bitch to our mother’s house.” I recognized Trina’s voice, and I winced.Ouch.
Max sighed. “Don’t talk about her like that. You don’t know her.”
“Oh, but I do know her. I was there, remember? I lived through all of it with you. She destroyed your life. Why are you bringing her here, Max?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I appreciate that you were there for me when it all fell apart, but it’s so much more complicated than you understand. She’s my friend. That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to understand more than that.”
I should really have walked away or announced I was there. I did neither thing. I just stood there like a high schooler eavesdropping on gossip that happened to be about me. I couldn’t even blame Trina for how she felt. I had hurt him, and if someone did that to one of my sisters, I wouldn’t want to have them in my house either.
Well…this was technically her parents’ home, but same difference in the end.
“Does she know what she cost you? What it is still costing you? How you had to sign up with investors who are eating you alive? How you aren’t even earning on your own fucking restaurant yet?”
This time he sounded tired. “Enough. Thank you for caring, but Hope knows what she needs to know. I don’t want her toknow I’m struggling. She’ll try to fix it, and like I said, it’s complicated. She has enough on her plate already.”
I scurried away, my heart beating fast. He wasn’t making money?Damnit.Why hadn’t he told me? I shook my head. Well, I knew why. He didn’t want me to know.
“Hope,” his mother called to me when I wound up in the living room. “Come sit. I was just looking at old pictures. Look at this one of Max.”
I wasn’t sure I could smile and fake it right that second. I had to think about what Trina had said. I had to figure out what to do. Max was never going to be honest about his situation, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t help. Of course, I’d promised him when we started sleeping together that it would stop.
Damnit.
“Here.” Hayley patted the seat next to her and Cameron’s wife—whose name I now couldn’t remember—popped up to let me sit there.
There wasn’t anything I could do if he didn’t want me to. I had to…butt out.
With that thought, I forced myself to look at Hayley’s family photos. Max had been a very cute kid. Big, bright eyes and happy smiles. He always seemed to be holding a fishing pole or lying in a hammock in these sets of photos.
Hayley pointed to one where he held a cat. “That was his third cat he brought home that summer.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Oh, Max was always bringing home strays. Whatever animal he thought needed him, he took it home. Third cat. Five dogs. A rat. A chicken. Sometimes they were other people’s pets and he just didn’t know. It was cute.”
“Ugh.” Max walked into the room. “Are you seriously showing Hope family photos?”
I smiled. “That’s okay. This is lovely. No one has photos of me from when I was young. I think there are maybe three photos from my whole childhood.”
