Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(39)

So that was what Eve saw. But what did she see? Must be something beyond a family photo, judging by the expression on her face. It was soft, her eyes like melting chocolate, her mouth a gentle curve. Her hair was still up, and for once, she wasn’t wearing her AirPods. She had small ears that stuck out slightly. He had the strangest urge to flick them, which made no sense at all.

Then she said, “You grew up with Lucy, didn’t you?”

Jacob ran his tongue over the inside of his teeth. “I met Lucy when I was ten.”

Eve nodded before pointing at Liam. “Is that your brother?”

“Cousin. Liam. He’s away right now. For work.”

“Oh.” She paused. “So Lucy really is your aunt. I mean—a relative kind of aunt, not a mum’s friend kind of aunt. Because you and your cousin look so alike.”

Jacob stared. “We don’t look alike.” Liam was handsome and charming and probably could’ve played the badboy love interest on a daytime soap opera if he hadn’t been born to play with engines instead. Jacob saw the family resemblance, but he knew he was sharper and harsher and altogether more awkward in a way that drained the handsomeness right out of him.

But Eve frowned as if he wasn’t making sense and said, “What? You’re practically identical. You see that, right?”

Jacob tried to compute the many implications of that statement and developed a small headache that encouraged him to stop. “You thought Lucy wasn’t my aunt?”

“She’s protective over you like a mother. You have different surnames but you love her enough to name Castell Cottage after her. And you never talk about your parents. I thought maybe she’d adopted you or fostered you or something, and you didn’t want to call her Mum.”

“She did adopt me. I’m her son.” He cleared his throat. “Legally, I mean.”

“Not just legally, from where I’m standing.”

Jacob supposed that was a comment on love or emotional connection or what have you. He shifted uncomfortably and searched for a new topic.

But Eve apparently wasn’t done. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

He blinked. So am I. “Sorry for what?”

“That they . . . um . . .” For once, she looked awkward, lacing her fingers together and shrugging her shoulders. “Sorry . . . for your . . . loss?”

Jacob realized what she was getting at and snorted. “Are you? You don’t sound certain.”

“Oh my God, Jacob.” She squeezed her eyes shut and winced.

He decided to put her out of her misery. “My parents aren’t dead.”

Her eyes flew open. “Aren’t they?”

“Well, I suppose they might be. I’d hardly know, at this point. But last I heard, they were alive and well, terrorizing a small village in southern Italy. Mind you, that was a few Christmases back. This time of year, they’re probably in . . .” He thought for a moment. “Thailand? Cambodia? Maybe Laos.”

Eve stared as if he’d started speaking a foreign language.

With a sigh, Jacob did what he’d always done, right from his first day at school, back when he’d arrived in Skybriar. He ripped off the bandage and splayed his guts out there like they didn’t matter one bit. All the better to speed up everyone else’s eventual boredom with his life story.

“My parents are international adventurers, also known as spongers, grifters, or childish twats. They had me by accident and weren’t pleased with the result. After about a decade, they gave up and came back to England long enough to dump me on Lucy’s doorstep.” He made his voice as flat and robotic as possible during this recitation, because if his words were impenetrable iron bars, no one bothered to look beneath. To see the anxiety he’d grown up with, waking up somewhere different every morning in the bed of his parents’ truck.

To hear the things they’d told him, as they arrived in Skybriar on that final day: You’ll be happier here, Jacob. Lucy has more time to deal with your . . . quirks.

To understand how humiliating it had been, that first day at school, when he’d realized all the other children could read, and he’d had to put his hand up and whisper to the teacher that he . . . couldn’t. Because his parents hadn’t cared enough to teach him. Because they’d assumed, thanks to his slow speech and his atypical processing, that he was unable to learn.

No, no one was supposed to notice all those parts. And yet, when Eve turned those huge, dark eyes on him, her brow furrowed and her soft mouth pressed into a hard line, he had the oddest sensation that she’d noticed it all.

Which was obviously impossible. But still.

“So you met Lucy when you were ten,” she said finally, “because your parents showed up and . . . gave you to her?”

Jacob decided not to mention that the giving had been more . . . dropping him off on the doorstep and telling him to ring the bell as they drove away. “Yes.”

“And before that, you—what, traveled the world with them?”

“Yes.” Most people thought of that as an idyllic childhood. He was aware that millennial hippies in particular would call it parenting goals.

But Eve looked horrified, probably because she’d read all his guidebooks and seen his meticulously cleaned bathroom and realized that spending the first ten years of his life on the road had grated against his fucking soul and turned him into the most nervous and unsettled child on earth. “Shit.”