The Watcher Girl(12)

I laugh for a second, until I realize she’s not kidding. “Oh. Cool. Congrats.”

Rose peels her attention from me, chewing on her lower lip.

“Does Dad know?” I ask. “Evan?”

“Nope. And not yet. You’re the first.”

I’m confused. “Why me?”

“Because you’re my sister.”

I imagine she had an idea in her head about how she expected this to go. Happy tears, maybe. Hugs. The fusion of a bond long in the making.

I would give her those things if I could.

“How far along?” I ask, an attempt to keep things in neutral as opposed to emotional overdrive. Pregnant people, in my limited experience, can go from zero to tears in three seconds flat, and I don’t do tears.

She lifts a shoulder, causing ripples to fan out across the surface of her untouched coffee. “I don’t know. I just found out last week. And I keep forgetting. It’s like every morning I pour myself a coffee, and then I remember . . .”

“It probably just hasn’t sunk in yet. I’m sure it will.”

She places her coffee on a concrete step, folding her hands over her face and breathing deep through her slender, graceful fingers.

It takes me longer than it should, but eventually I settle beside her, looping my arm around her shoulders. I’m tense, and everything about this is unnatural, but again, this is not about me.

“It’s going to be fine,” I tell her, wondering if she can feel the shake of my palm against her. Touching other people (and conversely, being touched by other people) isn’t something I do every day. “It’s not like you’re fifteen.” Like my birth mother was when she had me . . . “You’re twenty-seven. And Evan seems . . . nice.”

Weird. But nice.

My boss, Jonah, would call him an “odd duck,” and I’d have to agree. The son of a retired Lebanese supermodel and a reclusive Silicon Valley genius, he’s got both looks and brains, but zero personality.

“He just got that associate professor job,” she says. “He said he didn’t want to start a family until he was tenured, which could take years, maybe even a decade.”

“You do know how babies are made, right?” I tease. “These things . . . they’re preventable.”

She cracks a smile like she catches my drift, like she’s not as dense as I assumed.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time,” she says.

I leave my arm around her and quietly mourn the relationship we could’ve had if only things had turned out differently. We were separated by three years and didn’t share an ounce of DNA, but maybe we would’ve been close.

Guess we’ll never know.

“When are you going to tell him?” I ask.

Rose sighs. “Soon.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I just . . . I know once I tell him, he’ll want to get married. He’s traditional like that.”

“Then say no. He can’t force you.”

“I know,” she says.

“Do you even love him?” I peel my arm off her and stand up again. I need space. And air. But mostly space. All this closeness is suffocating.

She shoots me a look. “Of course I do.”

“Then what’s the issue?”

Rose is quiet, but her brows are furrowed. “Everything is so perfect right now. What if . . . What if we get married, and he changes? Or I change? What if all of this goes away?”

“He will. And you will. And it will,” I say. “Just be good to each other, and you should come out of it unscathed.”

She smirks. “You make marriage sound like war.”

“Isn’t it, though?” I shrug. “I don’t speak from experience, so my advice is probably shit.”

“We didn’t have the best example of what a healthy marriage looked like,” she says, “did we?”

“History only repeats itself if you let it.” Look at me, being all objective and rational.

It’s always fascinated me how the mere presence of certain people brings out sides of us we didn’t know existed, forcing us to be something we’re not, if only for a temporary moment.

Rose runs her reedy fingers through her shiny, tousled hair. “You know, I’ve dumped every boyfriend I’ve ever had because I was paranoid that he was cheating on me. My biggest fear is that I’ll marry Evan, and he’ll turn out just like Dad.”

I don’t hesitate. “Evan is nothing like Dad. Not even close.”

Dad has a personality, for starters.

“I’m sure when Mom married Dad, she never thought he’d . . .” She doesn’t finish the sentence.

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t trust anyone either.”

“And how’s that working out for you?” She winks.

“Wonderfully.” I rest my hands on my hips. “Thanks for asking.”

Silence settles between us, as if we’re quietly feeling out this newfound possibility of a connection that never existed before.

A silver SUV crawls by, and I hold my breath until I ascertain that it’s not a Toyota, that it’s not Sutton.

“What’s it like not being afraid to be alone?” Rose asks.