“This is the courtesy car? Last time I took ours in, we got a ten-year-old Kia that leaked when it rained.” Hope pats my shoulder. “You kids have fun now.”
“Have you heard from Rian lately?” Connolly asks.
Hope fixes on her blankest look. “Me?”
“If you do, please tell him I need to speak to him. It’s urgent, and he isn’t answering my texts.”
I bite back the urge to snark that I know what that feels like.
“I’ll tell him,” Hope says. “But if you want him to answer, you have to stop marking them all as urgent.”
“I mark them all urgent because they always are.”
“Then maybe, just maybe, you could occasionally text him to say hello, and not only when there’s a family emergency you think he’s caused.”
“I don’t think—” Connolly cuts himself off. “Point taken. However, you might also remind Rian that when I do message to say hello, he accuses me of checking up on him.”
She sighs. “Noted. I’ll talk to him. Also, I’m going to start billing you two for sibling mediation services.”
I slide into the car and wave goodbye to Hope. I wait until we’ve reached the edge of Unstable before saying, “Everything okay with Rian?”
He makes a noise in his throat. In the Connolly family, Aiden is the good son. The golden boy. Rian is the disappointment. The black sheep. All siblings are cast into stereotypical roles. In our family, Ani is “the smart one,” and I often feel overshadowed by that. Hope is “the pretty one,” and I feel overshadowed there, too. I’m “the fun one,” and they feel that shadow cast by that, as weird as it seems to me.
But our roles were assigned by outsiders. To Mom and Dad, we were all smart, all pretty, all fun to be around. With Connolly and Rian, it was their parents who assigned their roles, and their parents who keep them in them, and their parents who use those roles to pit them against each other. Connolly must look after his wild younger brother and rescue Rian from whatever scrapes he gets into, even if they’re half a lifetime past being children, and even if Rian resents the interference, understandably so.
It’s messed up. That’s all I can say. Hope wasn’t joking about sibling mediation. It’s almost like being an interpreter between people who don’t speak a common language. “When you say this, your brother hears that.” “When you do this, your brother feels that.” I’m just glad that they’re both willing to listen.
I’m also willing to listen, yet Connolly only makes that noise in his throat that says yes, there’s an issue, but he doesn’t want to discuss it.
I’ll deduce, then, that whatever’s been wrong in the last few days does indeed have nothing to do with me. Another family emergency that Connolly got sucked into. He had to cancel our weekend, and he didn’t mean to be so abrupt with it. He was just distracted.
I can grumble that if it’s not about me, then I shouldn’t be affected. But while Connolly can be the model of considerate behavior, you don’t grow up in a family like his without developing a strong kernel of self-absorption.
“Hope’s good for Rian,” he says as we reach the highway.
“Um-hmm.”
He glances over. “The question is whether Rian is good for Hope, with the answer being ‘probably not.’”
“I’ve come to accept that if she gets hurt, she’s old enough to deal with it. He’s good for her, too, in his way. My concern is mostly that he’ll be careless with her. He hasn’t been so far.”
“Agreed.” He exhales the word, as if in relief.
“You aren’t your brother’s keeper, Aiden. If Hope does get hurt, I’m not going to blame you. I’m just going to kick Rian’s ass.”
His lips twitch. “I’ll hold him down.”
“Thank you.”
His phone rings. With this not being his car, the caller doesn’t show up on the dashboard. He doesn’t check his watch, just taps the Decline button. He knows who’s calling, and I’d bet my life savings it’s his mother.
“You need to set ringtones,” I say. “So you know who’s calling.”
“I always know who’s calling.”
“There’s also a handy call-block feature. Or one that sends certain callers straight to voicemail.”
He only gives a humorless quirk of his lips.
His phone rings again. Again, he taps Decline.
“Aiden?” I say. “Not getting up in your business, but I’m guessing whatever’s going on explains your sudden urge to fetch a cursed painting tonight.”
A strained chuckle. “I had hoped my motivation wasn’t quite so transparent, but yes.” He hesitates. “Is that all right? I do think it’s safer to get it ourselves. I wasn’t trying to rope you into an unnecessary trip.”
“You didn’t.”
He relaxes into his seat. “Then, yes, if you can temporarily block calls from my mother, I would appreciate that. I would have done it myself, but I told her I was working at home tonight, and she usually respects that.”
I pick up his phone and then hesitate. Is his car really in the shop? His mother has been known to track him, going so far as to send security personnel to “check up” on him if he isn’t where she expects him to be. She treats him like a teenager with a behavioral issue who’s lost the right to privacy. He doesn’t live under her roof. He doesn’t work for her business. He doesn’t give a damn about his inheritance, so she can’t even hold that over him. Yet she holds something, and we haven’t reached the stage where I can ask. I only know that it’s not a matter of telling him to cut the apron strings. These aren’t apron strings—they’re cast-iron ankle monitors.
I won’t ask about the car. Better he thinks I buy the excuse than force him to admit he had to rent a car to play hooky with me.
I open the phone. “Uh, it’s not your mom. It’s someone named Taylor Silver.”
His brows knit. “That’s the seller. Can you check for a message?”
I hold the phone out for him to unlock it with his face. Then I tap voicemail and hesitate.
“Ignore all the ones from my mother.”
“And your father?”
“My father’s calling, too? Now I’m really in trouble.”
He rubs a hand over his face and murmurs an apology, as if that flicker of annoyance had been a raging tantrum. Sometimes I think a raging tantrum might do Connolly a world of good. Whatever lessons his parents have injected, they include keeping his cool at all times, and if that hardened into an icy wall that might be mistaken for arrogance and indifference? Well, it’s better than the “weakness” of an emotional reaction, right?
I’m about to listen to the seller’s voicemail when I notice another message.
“Oh, you also got a voicemail from a Theodora an hour ago. I’ll let you listen to that, presuming it’s business.”
He stiffens, hands clenching the wheel before relaxing. “Yes, I’ll take it later. Thank you.”
Not business then. Theodora O’Toole. The surname screams Irish, and the given name screams money.