She lifted her eyebrows. “They’re out of town, so that should be fine.”
“And I want to borrow these.” I lifted the other hand.
If I thought her eyebrows were high before, they shot up even farther.
"You …" She shook her head. "That's what you want?"
"Do we have a deal?"
"I-I'll call them right now," she said cautiously. In her eyes, I must have lost a bit of my appeal and replaced it with a healthy dose of insanity.
Marty chuckled. "You're serious, man?"
I looked at my hands. "As a heart attack. She won't say no to this."
Chapter Fifteen
Molly
"Do you think Paige would think it's weird if I write a paper on the maternal impact she had on older children who have no biological tie to her?"
My hand froze, the bottle of wine suspended mid pour over my glass. "Umm, no?"
Claire typed furiously on her laptop before slapping it shut. "I can't figure out what to do with this paper, and I have to get started."
Isabel came down the hallway of our apartment and glared at Claire’s computer like it kicked her in the crotch. "Do you have to type so loudly? You sound like a chicken pounding a mallet on that thing."
Claire flipped her off.
From my perch on the couch, I smiled at both of them as I took another sip of my wine. It was drier than I usually liked, so I grimaced as I swallowed. Lia and Claire were huddled together on the other end.
Their faces were mirror images of each other, but our family could tell them apart with no problems. It was in the angle of Lia's jaw and the slope of Claire's nose. Not to mention, the second they opened their mouth, it would be a dead giveaway to anyone who actually knew them.
Our mom—or as Isabel affectionately referred to her, that selfish bitch who birthed us—might not have won any parenting awards, but she passed down a helluva gene pool because all four of us bore a striking resemblance to her. I could see her easily in the dark, thick hair, high cheekbones, and shape of our blue, blue eyes.
Isabel's smile was more like our dad's, more like Logan's, and she had the same lanky, athletic build that Emmett promised to have as he grew up. My curves had lessened into adulthood, but the twins still maintained a curvier figure as they tiptoed quietly into their twenties.
"Why wouldn't you write your paper about Paige?" Lia asked, handing Claire a half-finished glass of wine. Claire took it without a word and finished for her. "She basically was our mom."
In the kitchen just around the corner, Isabel slammed the cupboard door shut. "There's no basically about it," she called.
I smiled at Claire. "Which class is this for?"
She was graduating from college with a major in developmental psychology and a minor in sociology with plans to start her master's in the spring after a winter graduation. Dropping her head back on the couch, she sighed. "Sociology of families. I should have taken it earlier, but"—she shrugged—"I was kind of dreading this part of it."
Lia took the empty wine glass from Claire and set it on the end table. "Our family isn't that dysfunctional."
"No, but trying to discuss the structure of it is a bit confusing." She started ticking off fingers. "We had married heterosexual parents with an unconventional age difference. One died, followed a few years later by one voluntarily abandoning us to an unmarried heterosexual male relative. A couple of years after that, he married a single heterosexual female for legal purposes. Neither adopted us, and Paige never had guardianship rights installed, so technically, she's just a cool sister-in-law who helped when she didn't have to." Claire shook her head when Iz slammed something else around in the kitchen. "For all intents and purposes, she was the main maternal figure in our life, but our mother is still around. Just not … around us."
"Isn't she in fucking Bali or something?" Isabel muttered from the kitchen. “That’s what her last bullshit email said, what? A year ago?”
"India, I think," I corrected. "She lives at that center. The weird guru guy who wrote all those books on mindfulness and blah, blah, whatever."
The wine had me feeling pleasantly fuzzy, not drunk, not even really buzzed, but just happy enough that I didn't even care that we were talking about Brooke—that selfish bitch who birthed us. Even she was a pleasant distraction from the fact that Noah had invited me to come look at the house. Saying no had been hard. Really, really hard. Like Noah's biceps hard. Noah's rock-hard ass hard.