Page 45 of Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail

Astrid tilted her head at her. “Let me see that one more time?”

Jordan laughed, but she obliged, really hamming it up just like a silent movie actor reacting to a villain with a dagger.

“You and Simon played a drinking game when you were kids?” Astrid asked when she stopped laughing, rattling the huge square ice cube in her glass.

“Well, drinks might’ve taken the form of Sour Patch Kids, and our tongues may or may not have been raw by the end of the movie. Simon may or may not have puked in the back of my grandma’s car.”

Astrid leaned against their shared armrest, toying with the tiny straw in her whiskey. “Just Simon?”

“I have a stomach of steel.” Jordan patted her belly. “And, okay, I may or may not have insisted on the front seat so I didn’t barf.”

“What was that like? Growing up with a sibling?” Astrid asked.

Jordan’s brows dipped. “Isn’t Delilah your sister?”

Astrid blinked for a second. Shit. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about Delilah—one didn’t easily forget Delilah Green—it was simply that playing games, vying for the front seat, eating candy together until you spewed... these were not things she ever did with Delilah.

“Stepsister,” she said. “And it’s complicated.”

Jordan nodded, eyes searching Astrid’s in a clear invitation to keep talking.

So Astrid did.

She told her all about growing up with Delilah—her father dying of cancer when she was three, her stepfather dying of an aneurysm when she was ten, how both Delilah and Astrid spent the bulk of their adolescence believing the other one hated them, when really, they were just kids who had lost too much and didn’t know how to process it all.

“And my mother...” Astrid said. “Well, let’s just say I’d need about ten more of these before getting into all that.” She jiggled the ice in her glass.

“Shit,” Jordan said softly. “That’s... that’s rough.”

Astrid said nothing, then stuffed another handful of popcorn in her mouth. She’d never been comfortable talking about her grief, her loneliness as a kid. In fact, she hated it. The only reason Claire and Iris knew any of it was because they were there for it. She couldn’t possibly hide her past from them, but that didn’t mean she chose to wax poetic about everything she’d dealt with on a regular basis.

And, sure, maybe it was just the whiskey—she didn’t make a habit of drinking hard liquor—but as Jordan took all of this in, pointedly offering zero placations, Astrid felt her shoulders loosening up a little.

“What about you?” she asked.

Something flickered in Jordan’s eyes. “What about me?”

“Come on,” Astrid said. “I shared my mess, you share yours.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” Jordan’s tone had turned sardonic.

“I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve had a heart-to-heart, but yeah, I’m pretty sure it is.”

They both fell silent at that,heart-to-heartshimmering in the space between them. Astrid hadn’t really meant to call it that, but she couldn’t think of another word for their conversation right now.Still, unease crept in slowly, the fear that Jordan was just going to leave her hanging here with a good bit of her emotional baggage on the proverbial table, offering her nothing to balance the load.

“You know I have a twin brother,” Jordan started.

Astrid breathed out as quietly as possible. “Yes, I know this.”

“And a grandmother.”

“Jordan.”

Jordan laughed and leaned a little closer. She smelled like the woods, an almost piney scent shot through with something softer, like jasmine.

“Okay, okay, fine,” she said, exhaling. Then she told Astrid about her mother’s untreated depression when they were kids, how Jordan spent most of her childhood worried and blaming herself for not being able to make her mom happy.

“I know now it wasn’t my fault,” she said. “But you know, as a kid, with my undeveloped frontal lobe and all.”