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“Tanner thinks he should date. Austin, explain to him why he’s too young to date.”

For the record, Austin didn’t tell me to stay away from girls. He was the worst person for my mom to have talk to me about sex. He did, however, have a shitload to tell me about the kind of girls he thought I should like. Every time I brought up someone’s name, he would have a reason as to why she wasn’t good enough for me.

When Mom died, it was as if no one wanted to talk to me about it. They hid the full story of her horrific death and often spoke in whispers. Since they weren’t going to tell me, I did my own research and found out every gory detail myself.

I learned that you weren’t guaranteed your tomorrow, so you had to live for today.

I’ve been a shareholder in Sexton Media for eight years and never worked a day there. I know a fourteen-year-old can’t run a company, but I should have been there after school or in the summers, learning the business.

Bryce kept me back, telling me to go to school, that I’d be a better asset when I grew up. I watched him give up his dream of traveling the world while I got to live freely, doing whatever the hell I wanted. I sat back as Bryce gave his everything to keep the company running exactly the way our mother had while our father pulled back even more than he had before she died.

I learned what happened when you gave up on the life you’d dreamed of. You lost a part of yourself each day until there was nothing left.

When Father brought Missy around, he told me to mind my business. He said, when I was older, I’d get it. I got it clearly. He was bringing his mistress home to live with us.

Neither Bryce nor Austin got the education of Father and Missy that I did. I was the only one who wasn’t surprised when they got married. Dad knows Missy’s a gold digger. She knows he only wants her for her beauty. For them, it works, and I’ve learned what I don’t want in a relationship.

I was eighteen when Austin enrolled in the military. I was here in New York when I got the call he was injured and in a coma. Bryce fell apart while Dad and Missy were a mixed dynamic of concerned and aloof.

They wouldn’t let me go to Germany to sit by his bedside, but you can bet, when Austin was transported to Walter Reed, I was on the first flight. He healed and took his place at Sexton Media. Still, it hasn’t stopped him as he tempts danger at night, illegal race car driving doing nothing to quell his pain.

I learned what it looked like to run away from your problems instead of facing them head-on.

Even now, as Dad has given Missy half of his shares and Bryce and Austin fight to control something that’s spinning away from them, I’m told, “You don’t understand,” and, “Don’t do anything,” and “Trust me,” and “Promise me …”

All these years, I’ve been told to sit on the sidelines. Well, I have. And I’ve learned. I know more about life and love than any other Sexton, and I’m only the ripe age of twenty-two.

When Harper left me the voice mail, I sat with my thumb hovering over the Call button for a half hour. There was never a doubt if she knew it was me who’d created those images for her. She knows they were for her. That’s another reason why it pisses me off that she walked away from me the way she did.

Frustration takes over me as I realize I want to call her just as much as I want to forget her. Instead, I take the cream-covered novel upstairs to my loft and open it up. Inside is a notecard.

Not all romances end in love.

Thank you for our story.

I’m sorry I ended it before the chapter was over.

—Harper

How this woman can unnerve me with her words is beyond me.

“Aren’t you a bit underdressed for this place?”

That’s the first thing she ever said to me. It was rude and dismissive. Believe it or not, I was done for.

“Take me where you go when you want to run away from the world.”

When she said that on a street corner, I knew I had met my match.

“When I’m here, I don’t feel so alone.”

That was when I started to fall hard for Harper Doyle.

And therein lies the problem.

Somewhere between a speakeasy and a library, I fell for a teacher from Queens.

I’ve maintained my cool. Played it off like I haven’t been thinking about her every fucking day.