It had been nothing more than a silly, innocent infatuation with someone I didn’t really know. Plus, it had been put to rest the moment he’d mysteriously vanished and stopped updating—weeks before Lina and Aaron’s wedding—and turned out to be a no-show at the ceremony. I had buried all of that nonsense and told myself enough was enough.
My phone rang in my lap, and all of that was immediately forgotten when I caught my little brother’s face flashing on the screen.
“Olly?” I answered, heart dropping to my stomach. “Where the heck have you been? Why haven’t you returned any of my calls? Is everything okay? Are you okay?”
A long sigh came through the line.
“Nothing’s wrong, Rosie.” My brother’s voice was deep, that baritone texture reminding me he wasn’t a kid anymore. Oh no, he was a nineteen-year-old adult that had been letting all my calls go to voicemail for weeks. “And I’m sorry. I’ve been… busy. But I’m calling you back now.”
“Busy with what?” I asked before I could stop myself.
When Dad announced about a year ago that he was leaving Queens, where he had spent most of his life and where Olly and I had been brought up, to move to Philly, Olly had announced he wasn’t leaving. He also informed us that, unlike me, he wouldn’t be taking the college route. And we’d supported him, encouraged him to search for what it was that made him happy. I’d even helped him out with rent and living expenses until recently. But he struggled to find his calling. He struggled to keep a job for more than a few weeks, too.
The line was silent for so long that I feared he’d hung up.
“Olly?”
Another sigh came.
“Listen,” I said, every single emotion brewing inside of me coating that one word. “I’m not attacking you. I love you, okay? You know I do, more than anything. But you’ve ignored me for weeks, only sending me short quick texts so I wouldn’t lose my mind and report you as a missing person.” And I would have. I so would have if it had come to that. “So, don’t tell me you’ve been busy and expect me to take that as an explanation, please. Don’t—”
“I’ve been busy with work, Rosie.”
Hope inflated my chest for a second there, but it was quickly stifled by a hundred dozen new questions.
“That’s great,” I told him, pushing my concern down. “What kind of job is it?”
“It’s… at a club. A nightclub.”
“A nightclub,” I repeated, forcing myself to remain objective. “As a waiter? You tried that and…” Quit about three weeks in. “You tried that, and it didn’t work. At a café, remember?”
“I’m not serving drinks,” he explained. “I’m doing something else. It’s… hard to explain. But I’m making a good living out of it, Rosie.”
“I don’t care how much you make, Olly. I care about you being happy. About—”
“I am, okay? I’m not a kid anymore and you don’t need to worry about me.”
I was close to scoffing at his you don’t need to worry about me, but I held the sound in. Olly was an adult, and I understood his need for boundaries. His wish not to be babysat. But I was still his big sister, and he was still the kid I used to feed Froot Loops to for dinner when our fridge was empty, and Dad was working night shifts. “Okay, okay, fine. I’ll drop it.” Then added, “For today.”
He muttered a half-hearted, “Thank you.”
“So, listen.” I veered the conversation onto a safer ground. “I was thinking of grabbing a few sausage rolls and heading to Philly today. Surprise Dad with brunch. What about joining me? You could be back by evening. How about I meet you at the train station and we go together?”
A beat of silence, then he asked, “Aren’t you supposed to go to the office today? It’s Monday.”
I winced, silently cursing myself for my careless slip. Oh, crap. “I… yes. You’re right.” And he was, technically. What Olly—or Dad—didn’t know was that for the past six months, I hadn’t been calling InTech’s Manhattan headquarters the office. “But I have taken the day off. Just today. My boss is… more flexible with my time off now that I’m, you know, a team leader.”
“Ah, yeah. My big sis is a boss-lady now. That’s right.” He chuckled and I wished I heard that sound more often. I wished I wasn’t lying to him and he wasn’t keeping things from me, either. “So that promotion you got last year is working out for you, huh? Planning on climbing even further up the ladder, big sis?”