Page 88 of Rival Hearts

We hadn’t even had a chance to talk to Gabe, either. He was still out of town. He should have been back by now.

I picked up my phone and dialed his number. The phone rang for such a long time I thought I would get his voicemail, but then he answered at the last moment.

“Hey, sis,” he said. He was out of breath. “Sorry. I lost my damn phone in the hotel room and if it wasn’t for you calling, I wouldn’t have found it so easily.”

I chuckled. “Gotta love how organized you are.”

“This place is hell, you can’t blame me.”

My heart went out to him. “At least you’re in Houston, far away from home.”

He groaned. “It’s still too close for my liking.”

I hated Texas as much as he did, although he was in Houston, and that was far from where we’d grown up. Still, it was the principle of the thing.

“Weren’t you supposed to be back by now?” I asked. “I thought it was just a couple of days.”

“Yeah, that was the plan. But we had an issue with implementation and one of the rookies did something with his coding that none of usproscan actually find. Now we’re stuck combing through lines and lines of code to figure out where the hell he went wrong.”

“That sounds dramatic.”

“You have no idea. He’s too new to know what he did wrong, and he’s got even the experts stumped. I’m telling you, at this point we just look bad.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You’re a superhero.”

Gabe snorted when I called him that. It used to be a thing while we were growing up. I always called him a superhero because nothing ever seemed to get to him. He was emotion-proof, the way Superman was bulletproof.

“Well, this superhero is going to be stuck here for a while longer.”

My brother was always so happy-go-lucky, it was hard to know that he had so much resentment beneath the surface about what happened with my mom and my dad. But it was there, and whenhe had to do something like go back to his home state, he lost his shit in a big way.

“How are things over there?” Gabe asked.

“Good. Pretty much the same thing every day, but it’s positive.”

“Anything fun happen that I missed out on?”

I thought about the storm, the boat ride, the lighthouse, and me and Alex being stranded together. I wanted to tell my brother all about it—we usually shared all our stories—but I couldn’t tell him I’d been out with Alex. He would ask questions I wasn’t ready to answer over the phone.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s really boring back here without you, you know.”

Gabe chuckled. “Stroking my ego is just what I need right now. You’re a saint.”

“You’ll figure it out soon enough and then you can come home.”

“I will,” Gabe said. “And then we can hang out. It feels like forever since we had a chance. I’ve had to keep canceling.”

“Sometimes, work is a bitch.”

“You can say that again—shit. I have to go, sorry. They’re calling me again.”

“Good luck,” I said, and Gabe ended the call.

I dropped the phone and felt guilty for not telling him about the storm, but that would come as soon as he knew about me and Alex. I just had to approach it right. It wasn’t like I was going to keep it a secret from him forever, just for a short while longer.

I hoped he could come back soon. Both for my sake and for mine and Alex’s sake.

I felt bad creeping around with Alex behind my brother’s back. Even though I wasn’ttechnicallydoing anything wrong. Talking to him about it was the way to move forward. It was the decent thing to do.