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“Why were you in foster care?” he asked.

“Ew, too close.”

“Too close to understanding you?”

“Mmm, nope, nope, nope. No one will ever do that. If we keep walking another half a mile, they have those ice cream Drumsticks at the gas station. You know with the chocolate and the peanuts, and you untwirl the packaging as you eat it? Like when we were kids?”

He chuckled. “I’m in.”

Jess should’ve worn something more comfortable than a pair of gas station flip flops, but it would be fine.

“You saw my animal?” she asked, bringing it back up.

“Yeah, back in that big park behind the Safeway in Sister’s.”

“Ooooh, I remember that Change. That was an accident.”

“Were you pissed off?”

“Yep.”

“At?”

“Samuel, as usual,” she said with a dark laugh. “He was being controlling.”

“Shocking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your brother not being controlling. He has issues.”

“Yeah, but he’s my brother,” she said softly.

He gave her a sideways glance, and the smile faded from his lips. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Do you have siblings?”

“Nope. I was an only child. I was raised around other shifter kids, but I never had a brother or a sister. I can’t say I understand that bond.”

“It’s a strange one for me. Samuel and I were taken away from our mom at the same time, but he was older, you know? I looked up to him. When we were kids, he protected me, and took care of me, and it was us versus the world when things were bad. I built that bond with him when we were kids, but when I found him again as an adult? He was so different than I remembered. Hell, I was probably different than he remembered too. I had been in the gutter for a while by the time I found him. I was tougher, mouthier. I was more confident. Samuel didn’t like me much when I found him. He didn’t understand me anymore, and so I think slowly, over time, he needed me to go back to the scared kid that he could protect.”

“So he was allowed to change, but you weren’t?”

Jess chewed the corner of her lip as she considered it. “I guess if you put it like that, then yes.”

She thought he would take more digs at Samuel, but he didn’t. He just let her sit in her own thoughts, and come up with her own feelings on it all. She was ready to be defensive and protective of her brother if Kade took more shots at him, but he didn’t engage. So…she thought about it. Really thought about it. Yeah, what Kade had said made sense. Perfect sense.

“Maybe he had to be controlling because so much of our life was out of our control when we were little.”

“Your mom?”

“Alcoholic.”

He nodded, but didn’t push her, so she sat there with that word. At the stop sign at the edge of the neighborhood, they checked both ways and bolted across the semi-busy road. She could see the sign for the gas station from here.

“That’s hard,” he said after a couple of minutes of walking.

“You can imagine, or you know personally.”

“I can imagine. It wasn’t a part of my story. I saw friends go through it with an alcoholic parent, but it wasn’t my story personally.”

“I think she was trying to cope with the curse, and what happened to my dad,” she admitted softly, testing.