Page 2 of Rhodes

"She's coming over here," Deuce says, delighted. "Like a moth to the flame. Come to Daddy."

"That's Cooper's sister, asshole. Put your dick back in your pants."

The grin falls off his face. "That's Coop's sister? Little Tilly? Damn, she's really grown up since the last time I saw her."

"Not so little," Nash adds.

"She's off limits," I tell both of them. "You look at her wrong, you lose the eye. I mean it."

Another girl I don't recognize stops her on the way to us. She makes eye contact with me, but keeps talking to her. I notice she's holding a clear Dixie cup with a clear, fizzy drink and a wedge of lime gone soft on the ice.

Fuck.

"Copy," Deuce says. "Off limits. For the record I thought she was a Tulane girl, not a Maybank."

"Well, she's both."

Nash is running through the facts like this is some complicated concept. "Wait. Cooper Maybank. She just lost her mom⁠—"

"Yeah. She did."

The realization kills whatever the two of them had going. Deuce finds something fascinating in his beer, and Nash turns to say something to a guy behind him, giving me the out.

I take it because the reality of it all is doing something to me I don't want an audience for. Coop and I have already worked through the awkwardness since the funeral, even though the undercurrent of sadness is still there. But this is the first time I'm seeing Tallulah. She brings back the tent behind St. Michael's Church in downtown Charleston and a casket in front of us, and Coop's shoulders hunched in the folding chair beside me while Lizzy is being lowered into the ground.

I still can't make the tense agree in my head. I still can't say she was.

"Rhodes Stone." Tallulah finally breaks away from the other girl as she crosses to me. She's smiling like it's a normal Thursday night and we always bump into each other at a bar. I put my face back where it belongs and go to meet her halfway, because I'm not turning her over to Nash and Deuce. "I didn't expect to see you tonight."

We embrace lightly as her drink sloshes on my back. Not even a year out of rehab and she's out drinking. What the fuck?

This is the first time I'm running into her at a bar and not at a family party. She started college in the same city in the fall, but we might as well still be four states apart. We've never crossed paths until tonight. She goes to Tulane, and Cooper and I go to Loyola. Unless we plan it, which we don't, we don't see each other.

"This is the Loyola bar. You Tulane girls don't come to this side of Freret." I lean down on a round bar table toward her, putting it between us. "What are you doing over on this side?"

"My roommate, who abandoned me the second a guy with a dimple showed up, dragged a few of us over here." She tips her head at the two guys I've already forgotten, still marooned where she left them. "Quality crew you keep over here."

"I don't know those douchebags."

"What are y'all getting into tonight? Maybe my friends and I can join. Then you can protect us from the Loyola douchebags." Her eyes go down to my hand, to the beer, and then back up.

"My friends are all douchebags, too. I would never subject you to that. You don't belong in a bar, anyway."

"Is that so, Dad? Should I be hanging out at the convent on a Thursday night?"

Tallulah should be a sophomore, like her twin sister, Libba, who goes to the College of Charleston. But she had to take a year off to work through an opioid addiction she developed after a high school ACL injury. It wasn't her fault, necessarily, but she fell into a dark place. Cooper writes it off as a combination of dealing with a soccer career-ending injury and her mother's cancer diagnosis that progressed quickly.

She was in deep and had to go to a nine-month inpatient treatment facility in Virginia. She's only been out of rehab since last March, less than a year, so everyone is on high alert.

The Maybanks don't play when it comes to nipping things in the bud.

"Don't be a smart ass. You know what I mean."

"I don't need another babysitter, Rhodes. I'm surrounded by them. I'm a big girl and can take care of myself."

"You know I'm the last person who will micromanage you, Tallulah."

"Mm." She reaches past me, close enough that I get a wave of whatever she's wearing. It's warm and fresh, like the green dress that hugs her far too tightly. She picks up the cup she brought over and holds it up between us like evidence at a trial. "You want to know what I'm drinking, Rhodes? Will that make you feel better? Go ahead. Ask me."