“So, is Zara flying in with Angel?” Nathan asked. Sometimes Joe’s wife could get through to him when his anxiety got out of hand. But Joe shook his head and scrubbed the cups for a second time.
“She’s directing that documentary on the LA public school system.” Joe’s voice was flat, like he was delivering an earnings report to the board. “It’s not a good time to visit.”
“Visit?”
Joe froze. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but—” Nathan couldn’t bring himself to say the obvious. Beto was dying; this wasn’t like scheduling a vacation. “Do they know what’s going on?”
Joe started to speak, then shook his head with a grimace.
“Hey…” Nathan’s voice trembled. He tried to push away the memory of his brother babbling to himself on the floor. “Are you uh… you doing okay?”
Joe squared his shoulders. He knew exactly what Nathan was asking. Is it happening again? “I’m fine,” he said, with a firmness that meant it wasn’t up for debate. He picked up the cups and put them on a drying rack. His voice was softer when he finally spoke again. “But it’d be nice if you had my back through all this. Like I’ve had yours.”
Nathan paused so he wouldn’t dissolve into an incoherent mass of guilt and gratitude. “You know I do. Always.”
Joe held his gaze like there was something more he wanted to say. Instead, he looked at the calendar on his watch. “The luncheon starts at twelve thirty. Club sandwich or chef’s salad?”
His brother was right—Nathan needed to make more of an effort. “I’ll take the sandwich.”
Joe smiled. “Great. Now tell me about this girl you’ve been seeing.”
Nathan froze. “What girl?”
Joe pointed to his right. “Well, I assume those aren’t yours.”
Nathan turned around and spotted Rachel’s underwear near his bed. He snatched them up and stuffed them into his pocket, shrugging. “I had company the other night.”
Joe slapped his shoulder. “Good for you! Glad you could blow off some steam.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Nathan winced at how defensive he sounded. Joe finding out about Rachel was the last thing he needed. His brother had firm ideas about right and wrong, which probably included not sleeping with a married woman.
“Oookaaay,” Joe said. “So, what was it like?”
It was amazing. And it was awful. He wanted to relive that night on a loop while also wiping it from his memory. “It’s complicated.” The truth was dangerously close to spilling out. Joe knew what it was like to want someone who was off-limits. He’d dated Mia Williams, even though their mothers hated each other. But Mia had broken his brother’s heart. Joe would probably warn him not to waste his time pining for someone he couldn’t have.
Nathan yanked at his shoelaces. “I won’t be bringing her around. She’s got a lot going on.”
Joe searched his face as though he could identify the source of Nathan’s frustration if he stared hard enough. “Sounds like you care about this woman.”
“Yeah,” Nathan said too quickly. “I mean, I care about what happens to her,” he added, even though she clearly didn’t want him in her life. The faster he could work up the courage to delete Rachel’s number the better.
Joe tried to probe but Nathan stonewalled with a shrug. “Be careful, Nate,” Joe said. “Complicated things usually stay complicated.”
When Faith was little, a therapist told Rachel that her daughter was highly sensitive and “extremely connected to the world around her.” Faith was more likely to notice things that others didn’t: temperature shifts, textures, and sounds were all experienced with a greater intensity than the average person. If someone was nervous, Faith would be the first to notice. Or if they were hiding something, she could always spot that too. Now, at twenty-one years old, Faith’s powers of perception had extended to spotting the stress behind Rachel’s eyes through her small iPhone screen.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
Sitting up straighter on her bed, Rachel tried to remember to smile with her eyes instead of only her mouth. When Faith had moved to New York, she’d promptly negotiated their weekly phone calls down to biweekly check-ins, with text message status updates in between. So far, Faith was thriving. She had her own apartment, a graduation gift from the Abbotts, which she shared with a friend enrolled in the same applied food studies program.