Mom’s lips pursed as she studied me, an eyebrow flicking upward. “You’ve been leaving work for Ada again, haven’t you?”

“It’s not what you think,” I said, my hand balling into a fist on the table. I scrambled to prove my point, pulling at the last conversation I’d had with my sister. “I just talked to her today, and she told me how she was looking for a new place with a friend. That’s a world of difference from a few months ago.”

I left a lot of the drama out of the conversation, mostly out of preservation for Ada. It felt deceitful to give Mom half-truths, but if it could get her to see Ada and talk to her, it could be the one push Ada would need to get back into rehab.

Mom’s lips screwed tight, and she shook her head harshly. “It’s a lie, Micah. How many times has she done this? She’s going to say whatever it is you want to hear just to get what she wants.”

“But that’s not really her. She’s still in pain, and I think if she can see that you and Dad are together again, it can push her to get better,” I said, refusing to back down.

After Ada’s accident, she had taken on the entire responsibility of our parents’ split, forgetting that they’d been on shaky ground to begin with. I deeply believed the reason Mom and Dad reconciled was because of Ada, and I wanted more than anything for everyone else to see it.

I cupped Mom’s hand with my own and gave it a squeeze. “Can you at least consider it?”

Mom folded her lips into a thin line, her eyes shiny. “You know we’ll never agree about this,” she said, speaking over me when I tried to interject. “And I don’t want to fight about it, so why don’t we talk about something else?”

I slumped back in my seat, twisting my arms around my middle, my heart broken all over again. It was agonizing how Ada’s addiction made everyone in her life so fucking lonely. “I didn’t mean⁠—”

“I know, love. This is just how our life is now,” Mom said in the soothing tone she’d used my entire life. She picked up her phone again and pulled something up on the screen. “Do you mind giving your input on the centerpieces I’ve chosen for the reception tables? I’m worried they’re too over-the-top.”

There was no use in arguing, so I held out my hand for her phone. I listened to Mom talk about flower arrangements for as long as I could endure, completely out of my element.

Mom knew I was indulging her and eventually took mercy on me. “I have to go. Your father and I have an event with his company for the junior lawyers at the university.”

I flinched. My parents had mine and Ada’s entire future planned from birth. They’d put us through the best private school, had encouraged us to go to college. That life wasn’t for me, and Ada’s success always left me comfortably in the shadows.

Not anymore.

I said goodbye to Mom and watched her get in her car and drive away before sinking down in my chair and covering my eyes with the heels of my hands. Silently, I recited the mantra I’d learned from the countless support groups I’d attended, hoping it could assuage the sharp ache that pierced my heart.

I did not cause it. I cannot control it. I cannot cure it.

“Here ya go, baby. You look like you need this.”

I dropped my hands to see an enormous mug of coffee in front of me. Destiny pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. “Been a hot minute since I’ve seen you. Here I thought you’d up and moved away on us,” she said, a tenderness in her smile like she was actually glad to see me.

Which threw me off. Of course, we were friendly with each other like I was with a lot of customers I grew familiar with on my routes, but none of them tried to talk to me outside of polite conversation.

“Uh, yeah, I got a new shift schedule, so my route changed,” I said, still feeling wrong-footed.

Destiny hummed in understanding. “And how are you holding up with that?”

“It’s okay. I have to start earlier in the morning, which is a bit of a transition, but it doesn’t chew into my evenings, which is nice.”

Evenings were safe because Ada rarely called in the evenings. She saved that time for early mornings after several days awake on who knows what or when she needed a place to crash. On rare occasions, Ada would reach out before dawn and beg me to rescue her from some asshole’s house when things got a bit too heated.

It was always the same with Ada. I didn’t know how she wasn’t bored with it by now.

I picked up the coffee and blew over the rolling steam for a few seconds before I took a cautious sip. The warmth and chocolate notes were so lovely that I closed my eyes in gratitude.

“Thanks, I really needed this,” I said, the heat of the coffee slowly unraveling the tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders all morning.

The diner was in motion. People wound around each other to get to their tables while someone placed several plates on the kitchen window and hit the bell for an order up.

Two servers walked by, chatting, with one saying, “Yeah, it’s in that trendy spot in Old City, and instead of a wall, they have this curtain to separate the cocktail lounge.”

I wrapped my hands around the hot cup of coffee, my knee bobbing along with the surrounding commotion. I waited for Destiny to get up and walk away, but she stayed seated, tapping a fingernail on the table.

“Y’know, new delivery kid isn’t as good as you,” she said, still monitoring the restaurant. “Doesn’t seem to know that heavy boxes should go on the bottom, but I’m hoping he gets there. Looks a little in over his head when he gets the twins on the shift.”

“Can’t handle the chaos?”

“Hell no. Looks like he’s just out of high school. The girls like to mess with him, but they’re not as bad as they used to be.” Destiny nodded over to the twins working behind the counter. “Didn’t tell him they were twins, and it took three weeks for him to realize there were two of them, not just one person working round the clock.”

“I’m glad to hear that it didn’t take me nearly as long to figure it out.”

“Trust me, you clocked it quicker than everyone,” Destiny said with a smirk. She tapped her finger against the table and tilted her head to the side. “You know what? You should come to Jonah’s grand opening on Friday.”

My eyebrows flew upward. “I should?”

“Absolutely. It’ll be a blast because I’m the one who planned it,” Destiny said with a mischievous tone in her voice. She handed me her phone, and I accepted it, finding the contact screen open. “Give me your number, and I’ll text you the details.”

After entering my information, I tried to pay her for the coffee, but Destiny waved me away, telling me that the short break in her day with me was helpful enough. I slipped the bills in the tip jar anyway and headed back to my car.

My screen was filled with a slew of missed calls and a string of texts from Ada that swung between rage and apologies. I deleted them all, hit by a familiar exhaustion settling in my bones.

The text from Destiny was nothing more than a warm greeting and an attached image with the invitation to the party.

Well, I was always down for fun, and fuck it, if the party bombed, I could leave early.

I’ll be there.

NIK

Ineeded to get the hell out of here.

Old City was considered the “entertainment district” of downtown, but that mostly meant a shoddy-ass nightclub for college kids and a bunch of hipster restaurants. Sandwiched between an upscale Italian place and an Irish pub my pops lived in when I was a kid was Jonah Wright’s new farm-to-table restaurant, and it was bumpin’.

I came because of Duncan and Chance, and I still couldn’t find them in the mess of bodies, so I kept my ass at the bar, getting pushed by people, with the start of a headache stabbing in the back of my head from the DJ’s shoddily sampled remixes.

Which meant I had to listen to the bartender hit on every pair of legs that talked to him.

“The purpose of this area is to allow customers waiting for their reservations to have a place to pass the time,” the bartender said in a flirty tone to a woman as he pointed to black velvet curtain that served as the divider between the lounge and restaurant.

He continued to talk while he topped off a glittery drink with some kind of flower petal. The whole thing was only two ingredients and took four minutes too long to make. The woman was all about it, though, giving the guy drunken bedroom eyes as she took her first drink.

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” I muttered and knocked on the counter to get the guy’s attention. I shook my empty cup and said, “Hey, bro, can I borrow you a sec and get a refill of my Diet Coke?”