Page 129 of Love By Design

“My history with Marshall isn’t your problem.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “You’ve very much made it my problem.”

“What is your relationship with that man, Silas?”

You don’t have to talk to him at all.

Marshall’s quiet reminder rang loud as a bell in my head, and I grabbed my phone and stood up in one swift motion.

“I’m not doing this with you,” I told him. “Not now and not here.”

“Silas.”

“Not now and not here,” I repeated. “I’m not a child anymore, and I don’t appreciate you treating me like one. You raised me up to be just like you, but when it was time for me to stand on your shoulders, you shoved me down and kept me there. You tried to bury me with this grudge you’re carrying, and I won’t have it anymore. This win could have been yours, could have been ours, but now it’s just mine.”

It was a weird thing to realize that I’d outgrown my dad. To see the valley between us as something insurmountable instead of challenging. He would have been content to hold me back in all things and all ways as long as it suited him, then chide me for not being further along when it didn’t. There was no winning with him. There wasn’t even any playing the game. My dad, I realized, was still years in the past, back when I could barely hold a drafting pencil and my mom was still alive. It was sad, to know he’d turned into something stagnant so long ago, and his roots were too deep and gnarled to untangle.

The fact I’d cut myself free of him was a blessing because there was still time to extract my life from his before he pulled me down into the dirt with him. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the last time I talked to him, but…it might be, and that was okay.

It was okay.

I picked up the tray of my half-eaten sandwich and carried it to the trash and dumped it. My father didn’t call after me, and he didn’t chase after me. I supposed, in some way, that deserved a celebration too, even if my heart wasn’t ready for that part quite yet.

CHAPTER 38

MARSHALL

As usual, I got to dinner first. Finn second. We weren’t at our normal booth on account of needing more space to accommodate Andrew, but Finn still slid into the seat opposite me, a tight smile on his face. He’d done a stellar job of avoiding me over the past week and a half, which made it impossible to ask him about the couple I’d seen him with. So much time had passed since my initial sighting, the urgency had become less pressing, dying down to the point where I’d decided it wasn’t my business at all if my younger brother was in the middle of tearing apart a marriage. I didn’t want him to get hurt, but he was old enough to make his own decisions…and live with the consequences of them.

More than anything, I was hurt he hadn’t told me. There’d been years where all three of them had treated me as a sort of confidant. I was older and more removed from their day-to-day lives, and all of them had taken turns confessing and crying on my shoulder at some point over the years. As the twins had gotten more settled in their own lives, that had died off, leaving me with Smith and his troubles. Eventually, he’d also outgrow the need for me, and I’d be left with none of them at all. Not in the way I’d grown accustomed to, at least.

“How are you?” I asked Finn, instead of anything else.

“Alive and thriving, Marsh.” He rolled his eyes, some of the fight going out of him. “How are you?”

“Lost a job to Silas today,” I answered.

Finn’s eyes sparkled, and he fought his mouth back into a pensive line. “That so?”

“Mnhm.”

“How do you feel about that?” he asked.

Smith was next to arrive, also taking his usual space to my left. The table they’d given us for the night was round, but I appreciated the way we tried to notch ourselves into our usual seats which would either leave Andrew between me and Finn or Hunter and Smith. I flashed a smile at my youngest brother, then turned back to answer Finn.

“Proud.”

“Of who?” Smith asked.

“Silas,” Finn answered before I could. “Taking money right out of our oldest brother’s bank account.”

“Oldest for now,” Hunter said, taking his normal spot to Finn’s right.

All three of us looked sharply at him, and he shrugged. “What? We don’t know how many more of us there are running around. Just because we’ve only found Andrew doesn’t mean there’s not more.”

The truth of that settled like a smothering weight over all of us, and it was only Andrew’s arrival that snapped us back into the present. The implication of a new brother was a lot, the potential of more something unimaginable. The fact that Andrew walked up to the table like he’d known us on sight, the fact he was clearly a Covington…obvious by his build and the way his face was almost an identical match to Smith’s, made the reality of the other options even more terrifying.

“Not sure which of you is Hunter,” Andrew said, somewhatawkwardly. But I watched him hold himself like Smith, watched him try to be brave.