Page 102 of Strictly Pretend

“But you can’t do this,” I say to him. Granddad still hasn’t uttered a word. “Wait, does Mr. Salinger know you’re here?”

I take out my phone and pull Brooks’s name up, hitting the call button. Because this has to be some kind of mistake.

It goes straight to voicemail so I hit it again. Dammit, answer the phone.

Instead I just get the recording of his voice. “Brooks Salinger. Leave a message.”

“Of course Mr. Salinger knows,” Mr. Smith tells me. “He’s the one who told us to come here today.”

My hands start to shake. “He sent you here?” I whisper. My throat feels so tight it’s getting hard to breathe. Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he have let me know.

We spoke last night. We did more than speak. He had every chance to warn me.

“When did he tell you to come here?” I ask.

Mr. Smith frowns. “On Saturday.”

I really can’t breathe. Brooks knew about this all weekend? He let me sleep with him knowing that we’d be faced with eviction on Monday morning?

Was he trying to distract me? Keep me from stopping this? Was it all a ruse? All those phone calls he kept taking, was this what he was doing?

Mr. Smith folds up the paper I refused to sign and slips it into his folio. “Thank you for your time. Please ask your lawyer to get in touch with us.”

With that, he turns and walks out and I try to call Brooks again. And when it goes to voicemail for the third time, I open my mouth to ask him to call me back as soon as possible, but no words come out.

Because just before the beep sounds, Granddad crumples to the floor.

BROOKS

“You need to calm down, man. You look like you’re about to have a panic attack,” Linc murmurs, patting my hand. Abigail reaches out from the papoose, giggling as she runs her hand over my face. At any other time I’d capture her fingers and pretend to eat them, but I’m too busy trying to call Emma to do anything else.

“She’s not answering,” I mutter. “What do I do?”

“Leave her a message?” Eli says helpfully.

I love every single one of my brothers more than I can ever put into words. But right now I want to hit every one of them. “If we’d had this conversation in New York I could be on my way to Hollow Oak by now,” I mutter.

“Maybe it’s for the best that you’re not,” Myles tells me. Like always, when he speaks everybody goes quiet. Growing up he was more of a father to us than our dad was. When Dad was constantly traveling, making the next deal, Myles was reaming us for our bad school reports and sitting patiently with us while he tried to show where we were going wrong with algebra.

“Why would it be for the best?” I say. “Christ, I need to talk to Emma.”

“Because you’re not thinking straight. And you just called dad an asswipe,” Liam tells me. “You can’t call dad that.”

“He’s messed everything up.”

Liam sighs. “I know that. Or at least, I know you think that. But he didn’t know that you’d changed your mind. What would you have done in his position?”

“Waited for me to get back in the office,” I say, fury rushing through me. “I can’t talk to any of you right now. I need to talk to Emma.”

Holden, always the calmest of us, holds out his phone to me.

“What?” I ask him.

“I’ve managed to track down one of the other tenants. Mark, is it?”

“He’s on the line?” I frown, looking at the phone my middle brother is holding.

“Yes. Want to talk to him, or would you rather throw another ashtray against the wall?”

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