Playing for Keeps (Heartbreaker Bay #7)(93)

No stranger to danger, she grabbed her trusty baseball bat on the way to the door. She hadn’t traveled the planet over and back more times than she could count without learning how to protect herself.

Just as she leaned in to look out the peephole, there came another pounding, accompanied by a female voice. “Brooke! Oh God, what if you’re not home? Please be home. Brooke ?”

She went still as stone. She knew that voice, though it’d been awhile. A long while. It belonged to her sister, Mindy Lemon, the one who had her shit together and wore a body armor of calm like other women wore earrings, the one who never had to count in even numbers in her head, the one who never lost her way or screwed up her entire life.

More pounding.

And something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.

Brooke yanked the front door open and Mindy fell into her arms. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year and hadn’t spoken in months. They had texted briefly last week, but only because it’d been their dad’s birthday, which had required a summit meeting since the man had everything he wanted and was all but impossible to buy for, and yet he expected presents.

“What the hell?” Brooke asked.

Mindy just hung on tight. They weren’t a hugging family. Hugs were saved for weddings and funerals, or the very occasional family gathering where there was alcohol, copious amounts of it.

Otherwise, the Lemons tended to just surf on the surface of such uncomfortable things such as demonstrative feelings and emotions.

But Mindy was demonstrating lots of emotion at the moment, emoting it at high volume as she cried and spoke at the same time.

“Min, you gotta slow down,” Brooke said. “Only dogs can hear you right now.”

Mindy sucked in a breath and lifted her head. Her mascara was smudged so badly that it was possibly yesterday’s mascara that just hadn’t been removed. She wore no other makeup. She was at least fifteen pounds heavier than Brooke had ever seen her. Her clothes were wrinkled and there was a suspicious looking dark stain on her t-shirt, which was odd because Mindy didn’t wear tees. Her honey colored shoulder length hair was the same color as Brooke’s, but Mindy’s hair always behaved. Not today. It was outdoing Brooke’s in the squirrel tail impersonation and looked like it was a week past needing a shampoo. She hiccupped, but thankfully stopped the crying.

Brooke nodded gratefully and braced herself. “Now. Who’s dead?”

Mindy choked on a low laugh and swiped beneath her eyes, succeeding only in making things worse. “Sorry,” she said. “No one’s dead. Unless you count my personal life.”

This made no sense. Mindy had been born with a plan in hand. At any given moment of any day, she could flip open one of her fancy notebooks and tell you exactly where she was in that plan. “You’ve got something in your hair,” Brooke said and picked it out. It was a Cheerio. “Wow.”

“It’s Maddox’s. He was chucking them in the car!” Mindy’s eyes were misting again. “You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have kids!”

Used to be a sentence like that could send a hot poker of fire through Brooke’s chest, but now it was more like a dull ache. Mostly. “Why are you falling apart? You never fall apart.”

Mindy tossed up her hands. “Well meet the new Mindy Lemon. Remember when we were little and dad opened his first store and we all worked there until it failed and everyone called us the Lemon Sisters?”

“We are the Lemon sisters,” Brooke said.

“Yes, but they made it a play on words, like we were lemons . As in bad lemons. As in worthless.”

“Okay, listen to me.” Brooke put her hands on her sister’s arms and gave her a little shake to make sure she was really listening. “We were never worthless back then, and we’re certainly not now. You’ve got a great life, Mindy. You’ve got the life you planned out for yourself.”

Mindy sniffed. “I know! And I get that on paper it looks like I’m the together one, but I’m not!”

Brooke might’ve taken insult, but Mindy didn’t mean anything by it. Fact was, she didn’t know anything about Brooke’s life these days. Which was another problem entirely. “What’s really going on here, Min?”

Her sister’s eyes filled. “I burnt the school cupcakes and the firefighters had to come and now the neighbor thinks I need Xanax. And dad’s thinking about selling the business, which puts me out of work. Linc says I should buy it, but I can’t so much as manage to potty train Maddox even though he’s thirty-two months old, and I think Linc’s having an affair with Brittney, our nanny.”

Whoa. Brooke stopped trying to do the math to figure out how old Maddox was and stared at her sister. “What?”

“Look, I’m sorry for dropping in like this, but when it all started to fall apart in the car, I remembered you were on our way home.”

“Okay,” Brooke said, surprised for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that her sister had actually never been here before, not once in the two years since she’d moved in. Brooke’s own doing . “Do you really think your husband, cutie pie Dr. Linc Tenant, the guy you’ve been in love with since the second grade and who worships the ground you walk on, is having an affair with the nanny? And since when do you have a nanny?”