“You’ll like this,” said Marion, and Hannah yanked my sleeve.
“Matt, look how many shelves this place has.”
“I don’t want to see it,” I snarled. “I’m tired.” I threw myself into a nook at the end of the hall. Hannah’s phone buzzed.
“I’ll give you two a moment.” Marion drifted down the hallway.
As Hannah thumbed her cell, I stared out the window at the blue evening.
I pretended it was all mine.
Soon, I could go for a run across the meadow, or an ambling walk with Hannah. Two hundred and ninety acres. We could get lost …
“Shit,” she said.
I snapped out of my daydream.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s … Seth. Well, Nate.” She wiggled her phone. “He texted me. Seth was in the hospital last weekend. They just released him. God, why didn’t we hear about this sooner?” She stabbed at the screen.
My dark mood shifted.
“Why was he in the hospital? Who are you texting?”
“He collapsed after a show on Friday. And I’m texting Nate.” She glared at me. “He didn’t say what happened, exactly, but I’m pretty sure we can guess…”
With Marion in hearing range, Hannah just gestured.
I snatched her phone and read her half-written text.
Out with Matt. Will call ASAP. Pls give more
“More what?” I said. “Out with Matt? What the fuck? How long have you been—”
“More details, obviously. Give me that.” She pried her phone from my hand. “What is wrong with you?”
“I almost put him in the fucking hospital myself. Do you realize that? I don’t care how much he fucks up his life right now. When are you going to get that? I despise him.”
“Well, I don’t. And Nate doesn’t. When are you going to get that?”
“We are getting married, for God’s sake.” I slammed my palm into the wood-paneled wall. Hannah flinched. It was the first anger I gave that house, but not the last.
“That doesn’t mean you get to tell me how to feel about people. Your brother is sick. He’s suffering. You should empathize.”
Seth’s invisible intrusion into my night, which was already going so poorly, infuriated me. Why did Hannah continually throw herself between Seth and my rage? Couldn’t she see that she was at the heart of that rage? Seth touching her … Seth trying to take her from me …
“I am done … talking about him.” I made my voice low. It shivered with emotion. “Done for good. Stop bringing him up. I am not going to fucking forgive him.”
Tears shimmered in Hannah’s eyes—whether from frustration or sadness, I couldn’t tell.
“You are always so upset,” she said. “Always. You don’t know how to be happy.”
“That’s not fucking true.”
“It is.” The first tear rolled down her cheek, and then the next. And I hated Seth, and the possibility that she might be crying for him. “I found this listing. I actually thought you would like it. I sent it to Marion”—she snuffled loudly—“for a surprise for you. Y-you said to meet you in the middle, but there is no middle with you! You don’t like anything!”
She started to cry in earnest.
I grabbed her wrist, my eyes wide.
“What?”
“M-maybe you don’t want to live w—”
“You said you didn’t…” I stood swiftly and cradled Hannah. In spite of her anger, she clung to me. “… didn’t want to live in the sticks. I don’t understand.”
“Thirty minutes from Denver isn’t the sticks.”
“Hannah. Bird.” I kissed her damp cheeks. I wiped away her tears until only her lashes were dewy. “Would you seriously live here?”
“Yes.” She laughed—a little hysterically—and her eyes filled again. “I would. I’m tired of the city, tired of the condo. And I know it’s … ridiculous and huge, but … we could get people to take care of the—”
Seth faded from my mind like a ghost, paler and thinner … gone. My anger faded with him. I lifted Hannah off her feet and I turned and turned, laughing.
Chapter 27
HANNAH
“You can touch it,” Chrissy said, frowning at the subtle swell of her stomach. “If you want to, I mean. I just hope random women don’t try to touch me. Ew.”
I eyed my sister’s belly. At seventeen weeks, she definitely had a baby bump. The band of her yoga pants hung beneath it and her tank top stretched over it. I wondered if that was good for the baby. Poor little guy … or girl.
I looked away.
“I’m good, thanks. Maybe when it’s … kicking and stuff.” I laughed nervously. The idea of feeling something moving in my sister’s stomach appealed to me less than touching the bump. Was I lacking normal maternal instincts?
Whatever the case, I planned to support my sister all the way. She didn’t need to know that pregnancy, well, freaked me out.
“Hey, I can’t get over how nice this place is. Seriously, you live in a palace.” I gave Chrissy’s new digs a sweeping look. For the past three and a half weeks, I’d spent all my spare time in moving mode: angsting over the Corral Creek home inspection, boxing up stuff at the condo with Matt, and driving Chrissy and her piles of junk to and from our parents’ house and her swanky new downtown condominium.
“Right? I kind of hit the jackpot.” Chrissy traipsed through the living room, which was filled with stylish furniture, to the wraparound balcony. Denver sprawled below.
“I mean, it’s really … nice that Seth set you up like this.”
“Nice? I guess so. It’s the least he could do, if you think about it.”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t want to get into a fight with Chrissy. Still, I didn’t like her tone: the jackpot, the idea that Seth owed her anything. It takes two, Sis.
“Have you heard from him much?” I said.
“Sure, we talk all the time.”
“How does he seem?”
“Fine. Busy.” She folded her arms over her stomach and beamed at me. “Can you believe we’re dating brothers?”
“It’s … pretty crazy.” Again, I wanted to snap at her. I wasn’t dating Matt. We were engaged to be married. Our love was real and trial-tested, whereas Chrissy’s only hold on Seth, as far as I could tell, was the baby.
But maybe she sensed that, and maybe her attitude grew out of insecurity.
“I’m sure he’ll move in here when he’s not touring so much.” She hummed and fluttered the drapes. “He wants me to get an ultrasound to see about the gender, but I’m waiting for him.”
“Waiting—what do you mean?”
“I think it’s something we should do together. Hey, are you gonna give me that, or what?” She looked at the flat cardboard box in my hand, one of Matt’s old shirt boxes. I had tied a purple ribbon around it.
“Oh, yeah.” I handed it to her. “I just came over to give you that, really. Kind of a housewarming thing, now that you’re settled.”
While she opened the box, I tucked my fingers into my pockets and surveyed the condo again. Matt still wanted nothing to do with helping Chrissy, but at least he “let me” help her. My arms ached from carrying boxes and moving furniture—heavy lifting that my pregnant sister couldn’t do. In a matter of weeks, she’d transformed from carelessly smoking mother-to-be to neurotically terrified of anything that might harm her baby.
More proof, I thought, that she viewed the baby as a means to an end.
That end being Seth Sky.
She’d quit her job at the Dynamite Club, taken up prenatal yoga, and, with a stipend from Seth, started eating organic. But I wasn’t buying it. The baby was a nuisance to Chrissy before Seth stepped into the picture.
“A … lantern?” She lifted the collapsed lantern from the box. The thin paper, turquoise-colored with circling koi, opened into an orb. Tears pricked at my eyes. This was the lantern I’d hung in my basement bedroom last year when I moved back home. It was a spot of color in my haze of depression. The first time Matt had visited my bedroom, he’d noticed the lantern.
He wrote about it in Night Owl.
Damn, the room was small, made smaller by Hannah’s queen-size bed and piles of boxes. The only window was high and narrow.
She’d hung a paper lantern from the ceiling. The sight of it tugged at my heart.
Now, the sight of the lantern tugged at my heart. What a long way Matt and I had come … full circle, it seemed. Writing together, living together. I blinked back emotion.
“For good luck,” I said. “I better get going.”
“I hope I don’t need luck.” Chrissy laughed and tossed the box onto a couch. “Thanks, Han. It’s adorable. Are you going to call your mystery man?”
I froze.
“What?”
“Ha! You look guilty. I’ve seen you from the balcony, always out there on your cell.”
“I’m … planning wedding stuff,” I said. “And house stuff. Yeesh. And soon I’ll be calling you for dinner dates with Mom and Dad, so don’t be dodging me.”
I scuttled out.
Whoa, Chrissy had noticed me making calls? Good thing she and Matt weren’t on speaking terms. That day, I waited until I was safe in my Civic to take out my cell and make a call.