“Is that what I am?” Heath asked, sounding both amused and annoyed. “A brother from another mother, Cat?”
“He’s my foster brother,” I added. “My family always took in foster kids and some stayed longer than others. Heath stayed long enough that we got close.” In a manner of speaking.
“I didn’t know that. You never mentioned foster siblings.”
Shit. Ethan was looking at me like he didn’t know me. But he did. He knew the me I wanted to be, the me I could be. I didn’t want to drag him through my past. But here was Heath. My past. And who I had once considered my present and my future.
Speaking of…
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked Heath, my initial excitement turning to frustration as I realized that he had just appeared out of nowhere and hadn’t even bothered to speak to me first. Let alone any sort of text or other contact.
He shrugged. “Around.”
Seriously? I went straight into pissed off. Four f**king years. Four years and not a word. “That’s not an answer. I thought you were dead!”
“Not dead. Though I wasn’t aware you would care either way.”
Was he crazy? Confusion made my breath shallow, my palms sweat. I had suffered when he left. I had cried until I threw up. I had taken off after him, only to walk two miles and realize I had no idea when he’d left or where he was going. I had stalked him online, never finding anything. I had stopped eating. Stopped showering.
And he was going to stand there and act like I hadn’t cared?
“How could you say that?” My voice shook.
But his eyes just studied me, dark and angry. “Maybe this isn’t the time or the place to discuss it.” He took my hand into his.
My frustration faded at his touch. A deep, intense longing rose up in me. God, I had missed him. But he merely turned my hand so that my new engagement ring was visible.
“Congratulations, Cat.” A mocking smile crossed his face. His jaw was tense. He took my hand and gave it to Ethan, who laced his fingers through mine.
“I’m Heath, Cat’s foster brother, like she said,” he told Ethan, and I could hear the edgy irony in his voice. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Ethan Walsh. Nice to meet you, too. It sounds like you and Caitlyn have a lot of catching up to do. Maybe tomorrow we can all grab some coffee.”
“Sure. Sounds delightful.”
That was attitude. Plain and simple. My eyes narrowed at Heath and I shook my head slightly in warning. What the hell was he doing? Why was he even there?
“I didn’t mean to interrupt a big moment,” he added. “I’m heading downstairs.”
A million questions were racing through my head, but there was no way to ask them. Not where we were. Not with who I was with listening.
Ethan stuck his hand out, because Ethan had good manners. For a second Heath just stared at it, but then he took it and shook briefly.
I’d never seen him in a suit before. He looked… dangerous. Very James Bond. He was even better looking than I remembered and I had spent a lot of time coaxing his image out of my memory banks. Especially alone in my bed late at night when I was lonely and my body ached.
“See ya,” he told me casually, before turning and leaving.
That wasn’t a promise of anything. It didn’t mean that he would or wouldn’t ever see me again. It certainly wasn’t a goddamn explanation for why he’d left or where the hell he’d been. What an ass**le. What a complete and total ass**le.
Ethan was taking a sip from his flash and I held out my hand. “Can I have a sip of that, please? My throat is dry.”
“Sure.” Ethan handed it to me and gave me a worried look. “You okay? You seem really shaken up.”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t even remotely fine. I took a huge swallow of whiskey. It burned, but it felt good. It felt hot whereas my entire body felt like ice. It was like I’d been dunked in the river in January. The shock had numbed me before I felt wracked by shivers of disbelief.
“He calls you Cat?” Ethan mused. “I’ve never heard anyone call you that.”
There was a reason for that.
I craned my neck to see Heath, but he had already disappeared down the stairs and into the crowd. God, the crowd. They were mostly disinterested, having gone back to their own conversations, but some were still glancing up at us, and I saw Aubrey biting her fingernail and studying us with narrowed eyes.
No. Just no.
I wasn’t going to let this ruin my night. This was Homecoming. I glanced down at the ring on my finger. It sat perfectly beneath my blue manicure, a rhinestone floating on the tip of each nail. They matched, the sparkles on my nails and the sparkle of the ring, and I hadn’t even known that box with a proposal would come out tonight. Not a clue. Ethan wanted to marry me and Heath wasn’t going to ruin it.
Even as my hand shook and my stomach fisted and my heart squeezed, I smiled up at Ethan. “I prefer Caitlyn.”
“I’ll call you whatever you want as long as I can call you mine,” he said, with a little smile, though I knew him well enough to hear the slight edge of insecurity there.
“I’m yours,” I said, reaching up to give him a soft kiss.
But even as I did, my thoughts were elsewhere and my eyes were drifting downstairs, searching, searching.
The first time I saw Heath I was sitting on the sagging back porch of our house, swinging my legs between two posts, eating a pile of blueberries I had picked off the neighbor’s bushes. I liked to maneuver them around my mouth, feeling the waxy skin on the inside of my cheeks. The car had pulled into the gravel drive and I knew who it was—it was a social worker car. They were always the same. An inexpensive sedan in blue or burgundy. The social workers were always the same too. Smiling women with a distracted air to them, wearing long skirts or capri pants in the summer, fur trimmed boots with puffer coats in the winter.
She gave me a wave as she stepped out of the car. “Hello. Is your father here?”
I nodded. “In the house.” I could have gone and gotten him, but I was more curious what annoyance she had brought with her this time. I was almost sixteen and by that time, I’d had around forty foster siblings. They were a blur of faces and names and bizarre habits. Some were cool, some were quiet, some I actually liked. Most hated me on sight for no reason other than that I had my parents, regardless of how shitty they were most of the time. Those ones liked to stand in my way in the hallway so I couldn’t pass and stole my clothes and put mouse shit in my cereal.