Chapter 10

Chapter 10

After dinner at my mother’s, we went home together. On the way, I could tell he’d wanted to explain several times, but I didn’t want to listen. His excuses would just be the same clichés from movies and TV shows.

Since I’d decided to let bygones be bygones, I didn’t ask. Instead, I smiled and said, "Ethan said he saw you yesterday."

His eyes flickered. "Yeah, I saw him too."

"You still didn’t talk to each other?"

"We did," he replied.

Ethan was a difficult man—bad-tempered, always acting like a street thug. In school, he’d once thrown a desk at a classmate’s head and broken a teacher’s desk. He’d start a fight at the drop of a hat, never giving anyone time to react. Later, when he and Dylan were sent to study in the UK together, Ethan had been at the bottom of their class. They were twins, but their lives and personalities couldn’t have been more different.

I turned slowly to look at the busy traffic outside the window—just like Luna and me.

In the days that followed, Dylan seemed determined to make up for standing me up that night. He showered me with surprises and romance: picking me up from work, taking me to fancy restaurants, buying me countless expensive but useless things.

He didn’t understand me. Luna would have loved all this, but I’d never cared about the value of a bag or the price of a restaurant. From the start, all I’d cared about was his feelings—and that was exactly what he couldn’t give me.

Another year of heavy snow arrived. Amidst the white, Dylan told me he’d be gone for three days. He did this every year, and I was used to it—because Luna Parker had died on a snowy day.

That’s why I hated winter the most.

"Knock, knock, knock."

Dylan wasn’t home, so I wondered who could be visiting.

"Sister-in-law!" Ethan’s voice called.

I smiled and opened the door. Ethan stamped his feet to shake off the snow and squeezed inside.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Is my brother home? C’mon, let’s go play in the snow!" he said.

I shook my head, gesturing to the snow-covered world outside. "No, it’s too cold."

"Oh, it’s not that cold! He’s out mourning his dead love—stop pretending to be sad here! Hurry up and change clothes! I’ll warm up the car," he said, covering his ears and running back out.

Ethan had always been like this: childlike, loveable, never serious about relationships—but never short of women. In his words, "Marriage and love are both graves. I just want to be free for the rest of my life."

I thought: Staying home would only make me overthink. Going out might do me good.

We went to Universal Studios, drank butterbeer, saw Bumblebee, and played until late at night.

To my surprise, Dylan had come home early.