Page 12 of Give In

“There he is,” Bram says.

Leo drops into the chair across from me and immediately zeroes in on my neck. “Whoa, dad, is that a hickey?”

“Good morning to you too, son.”

“So are you going to tell us who she is?” Graham asks.

“Not right now. Today is Leo’s day.” I look at my son. “When do we get to meet your bride?”

“You’ll see her at the ceremony. You’re going to love her,” Leo says.

The smile on his face hits me somewhere behind the sternum. I have watched my son’s face his entire life, every version of every smile he’s ever produced. This one is new. This is the one I have been hoping to see since he was small enough to carry on my shoulders, back when I was making silent promises to a kid who couldn’t hear them about the kind of life I was going to try to build for him.

He truly loves this girl.

Maybe I’ve been hasty. Thinking I needed to talk him into slowing things down. Maybe the ghost of my own disastrous early decisions has been following me around so long that I’ve been seeing it in places it doesn’t live. Leo is not me at his age. Leo is careful and kind and he chose a woman for the right reasons, not because she told him what he wanted to hear when he was too young and too stupid to know the difference. Kiki came with warning signs I ignored. My sister and Graham never liked her and told me so, and I didn’t listen.

Leo is an amazing man. I’m biased, but I worked hard to raise him to be kind and levelheaded, and here is the evidence of that work sitting across from me grinning about pina colada pancakes.

I decide, here and now, that I am done reserving judgment. Leo’s smile is enough.

“Ready to see Mom?” he asks.

“I am never ready to see your mother,” I say honestly.

“I totally forgot Kiki would be here,” Graham says.

Leo laughs. “I would never have heard the end of it if I hadn’t invited her.” He shrugs with the ease of a man who has accepted certain fixed features of his landscape. “She’ll behave. She almost always behaves in public.”

“Seriously, though, what is with all the smiling?” Graham asks, studying me with the look he reserves for things he hasn’t figured out yet. Which isn’t many things.

Bram leans back in his chair and nods in my direction with the satisfied expression of a man arriving at a conclusion. “I know that face. Fucker is in love.”

I pick up my coffee.

I don’t argue.

chapter

five

Clover

Walking into the resort spa feels like stepping into a fever dream of eucalyptus and soft lighting. There’s a veritable army of women in matching robes who look like they’ve never had a bad hair day in their lives.

I, on the other hand, look as if I’ve been through something.

To be fair, I have been through something. I’ve been through a transcontinental travel day from actual hell, an almost-sleepless night in a stranger’s suite, and an orgasm so thorough it rearranged my understanding of what my body was capable of. All before nine in the morning.

I am thriving. I am also barely upright.

“Clover!” My sister materializes at my elbow, already glowing in her fluffy white robe, her dark hair twisted up in one of those effortless knots that take other people forty-five minutes and three YouTube tutorials to achieve.

Okay, not other people, just me. Whatever. It’s one of the reasons I cut my hair into a sassy bob.

This is Juniper Hill in her natural habitat. Though she is my younger sister, she has always been the beautiful one, the capable one, the one who knows what to do in pretty much any situation. Meanwhile, I have always been the one who gets fired from cake decorating jobs and accidentally invites ridiculously hot strangers to join the Mile High Club.

“You look amazing,” I tell her.