Page 30 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
I cry about it anyway. Into a cot pillow, so the other girls don't hear. It's the one thing I let myself have, and I keep it small, and I'm done before morning, every time.
Because somewhere over a state I couldn't name, on that bus with my forehead against the cold window, I decided something. He was right.
Not about the cruel. He was wrong about the cruel, so wrong, and some furious little part of me is going to go on knowing that till I die. But underneath the cruel, down in the ugly true part, he was right. I owe her more than this. More than taking the second chance her heart bought me and spending it falling for the man she loved, in the home they must have shared, wearing the very thing she left behind. So I take my second chance, and I aim it at something that isn't him, and I try, every clumsy day, to be worth a heart I got handed by a stranger I never even got to thank to her face. The breakthrough, when it comes, comes the way these things come. A tiny indie nobody expects a thing from. A director who looks at my grounded, real, two-suitcases face and sees something he can use. A part that's small on paper and turns out to be the whole beating middle of the movie.
I get the call standing in the diner in my apron.
I've booked the lead.
And I stand there in the middle of the lunch rush, phone shaking in my hand, the best news of my whole scrappy life pouringstraight into my ear, and I do what I've done my whole life, the one reflex nobody ever managed to train out of me. When something wonderful happens, you call the person you love. So I reach for my phone to call the one person on earth I want to tell.
Then I remember I don't get to. That I never really got to. That the whole time I lived in his beautiful silent home I was only ever borrowing him, same as I'm borrowing everything else that beats and breathes in me. So I put the phone back in my apron pocket, and I go take table nine their fries, and I let the best day of my whole career be completely, perfectly, and entirely alone.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE MOMENT HER NAMEwent onto a call sheet, Maximo found her.
That was the cruelty of it, the private joke the universe told at his expense. She had hidden herself perfectly, right up until she started to do the one thing she'd been put on the earth to do, and the instant she stepped into a spotlight the man who had lost her could see her again, from very far away, behind glass, the only place he had any right to stand now.
He didn't go to her.
He had thrown away the right to walk up to her and say her name, and he knew it to the bone, so he took the only road still open to a man like him. He moved the whole world for her from behind it, out of her sight, where his help couldn't touch her and neither could he.
The small indie with no money suddenly had money, routed through three companies that carried his name nowhere. A distribution deal that should have died in a drawer got a second reader who owed someone a favor. A festival slot opened where none had been. He made calls that endedand keep me out of it entirely,and he watched the machinery turn, and he made very sure that not one dollar of it could ever be traced back to the man she'd run three thousand miles to be free of.
She would think it was luck. He needed her to think it was luck. If she ever once suspected his hand in any of it she'd walk awayfrom the whole thing to spite him, and she would be right to, and he would deserve the walking-away.
So he gave her the future and kept his fingerprints off it, the same way he'd given her the best cardiologist in the country and the quiet security detail and the safe corner of every room she'd ever stood in, unseen, unthanked, exactly as he had earned. It was the only way he was allowed to love her now. From the far side of a country, in the dark, spending a fortune she'd never know about on a life he would never get to be in. She was forbidden to him still, too young and carrying his sister's heart, and losing her had not changed either count. None of it ever once slowed the wanting.
It wasn't enough. He knew to the marrow that it wasn't enough. A man could buy a girl the entire sky and still have no standing to walk out under it beside her.
But it was the last language he had left that wouldn't hurt her, so he spoke it, night after night, fluently, into the silence of a city she didn't live in anymore.Be happy. Be well. Be everything, and never once know it was me.And he called that loving her because it was the closest thing to it a coward had left himself.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THERE WAS A LETTER.
Maximo had carried it, sealed, for two years, moving it from drawer to drawer the way you move a thing you can't throw away and can't bear to face. Mary had written it in the loopy careless hand she never grew out of, and left it where he'd be sure to find it because she was the kind of girl who planned for a dramatic exit she never once truly believed would come. Across the front she'd put three words that had kept him from opening it every single day since.
Max. Just in case.
Just in case. She'd written it light, like a joke, and he still hadn't read it because reading it meant she was really gone, and the sealed envelope was the last place on earth she was still a little bit alive.
She hadn't been his by blood. His father had married her mother the year Maximo turned twenty-four, a grown man with his own company and no use for a family, and a gap-toothed nine-year-old with a crooked-star necklace and no fear of him whatsoever had walked into his life and decided, without consulting him, that he was hers to boss. He let her. He spent every year since being exactly the brother she'd drafted him to be, the way you become the thing someone that certain has already decided you are. Not one drop of shared blood between them, and she'd been more his family than anyone who could claim it. That was the part nobody who reached for the wordstepsistereverunderstood. He had chosen her. Of every person alive, she was the one he'd picked to keep.
Which was the whole trouble, in the end. Because somewhere along the way she had picked him back, and not the way a sister was supposed to.
He opened the letter that night, on the floor of the room he could no longer stand to be in and couldn't make himself leave.
Max. If you're reading this, then I've gone and done something permanent and dramatic, and knowing you, you're sitting somewhere with the lights off deciding it's all your fault. So first thing: sit up. Your face is doing the frown. Stop it.
He almost laughed. It came out as something else, something that scraped on the way up and didn't make it all the way to sound.
Here's what I need you to know because you never let me say it out loud and you're a captive audience now. I love you. I have for the longest time, and not the way a little sister is supposed to, and I finally got tired of carrying it, so I'm going to tell you. And if you're reading this, then it probably went the way I was afraid it would. You turned me down, gentle as anything because you're you. And then something happened to me, and now you've decided the whole thing has your name on it.
It doesn't. Do you hear me? It doesn't.
You didn't do a single thing wrong by not loving me back. Nobody gets to choose who they love, not even you, and you tried to let me down like I was made of glass. Loving me back was never the deal. You showing up to everything, scaring off everyone who deserved it, being the best big brother a girl everbullied into buying her a terrible cake. That was the deal, and you kept it every single day of my life. I love you. Always did. Always will. And that stays true even though you're not in love with me. You'll always be my favorite brother in the whole world. Never mind that you happen to be my only one.
