Page 13 of Reaching Ryan

Good.

Finally, she speaks. “Get dressed so we can go.”

“Look—” I’m about to tell her I don’t want to go. I never want to go. Always make excuses for why I can’t but she still shows up, week after week, hoping that this will be the week I decide to act like an actual human being. Before I can give her my usual song and dance, she talks over me.

“Conner proposed last night, and I accepted.” She looks down and smiles at the cheap silver ring on her hand, a far cry from the five-pound rock she was wearing on that same finger a month ago. “We’re making the announcement tonight, after dinner. It would mean a lot to me if you’d be there.”

“Why?” I’m not trying to be a dick this time. It’s a real question.

“Because you’re family, goddamnit.” She shoots up out of her seat to glare down at me. She doesn’t look like a stranger anymore. She looks like my sister. “You’re my family and I—” She sighs. Smooths her fingertips along the edge of her fancy skirt. She looks up at me, a forced smile sitting on her face. “Please, Ryan. Conner and Patrick will have their family there. Cari’s parents and sister will be there for her and I just want—”

Grace.

“Okay.”

My agreement to go drops her jaw for a few seconds before she remembers her manners and it snaps shut. “Okay?” The hope and gratitude I hear in her tone is enough to make me what to drive a railroad spike through my temple. “You’ll go? You’ll—”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ.” I take another disgruntled swipe at my face before planting both hands to push myself out of the chair. It’s rough going. So painful I have to clench my jaw and grit my teeth against the sudden, familiar fire that erupts in my muscles and bones. When I’m finally standing, I turn my head to glare down at her. “That’s what I said. I mean, it’s not every day that my little sister admits she even has a brother, much less wants to trot me around like a show pony. I better take it where I can get it, right?”

“We’re family, Ryan,” she says firmly, showing me a little of the Henley I remember. “We’ve always been family.”

We’re not family.

We’re strangers to each other. Have been for a long time now. The thin, tenuous bloodline we share doesn’t change that.

She abandoned me.

Left me behind, and even though I did a pretty good job of fooling myself into believing that it didn’t matter, didn’t hurt, being forced to look her in the eye every day of my goddamned life has made me realize it was a lie.

It did matter.

It did hurt.

She chose our mother—and when our mother cut me out and cast me aside, Henley let her. She walked away from me without a backward glance. Pretended I didn’t exist because it was easier that way. Because I didn’t fit into the fairytale past my mother constructed when she left my father for her new, billionaire husband.

Even though it’s the truth—how I really feel—I don’t say it out loud because the truth of the matter is if our mother had chosen me instead of her, I would have done the exact same thing. So, I don’t say it. I just look down at her and sigh.

“Whatever—go wait in the lobby so I can change.”

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