Page 14 of Not As Advertised

I glanced at the time. It was just after 7:30 p.m. I still had at least four hours of work ahead of me. If I wanted to catch at least five hours of sleep, I needed to get back to my reports.

“Listen, can you pass me over to Claire for a minute? I am about to head home and don’t want to lose you in the parking garage.”

I fucking hated lying and tried not to make a habit of it, especially with my family. But there were just some things that they wouldn’t understand. The hours I had to put in at work was one of those things.

Moving to a new city had one upside, my family wouldn’t know I was pulling long hours. It wasn’t as if they could just drop by as Claire often did when she’d been out for a late night near my condo in LA.

“Okay. Love you, Aiden. Take care of yourself, please.” Isabel’s soft smile was warm with affection.

“You too, Iz. And by the way, that’s my line.”

My youngest sister, Claire, grabbed the phone before I could be sure that Isabel had heard me.

She was tall like Isabel and me, but she looked most like her father and my stepfather, Patrick Sullivan. She had his auburn hair and pale Irish skin. Freckles covered her nose and cheekbones and dusted both her shoulders and arms.

He’d been part of our life for four brief years but he’d been the father I never had. I’d been ten when my mother brought Patrick into our lives and fourteen when we’d lost him to a drunk driver. His warmth and positivity gave us a sense of completeness as a family. Though only Claire had been born with his name, we’d all chosen to take it when my mother married him.

When we’d lost him, we’d all been torn apart in different ways. I’d wanted to fill his absence by taking care of everything while Mom worked and tried to provide for three kids on her own for the second time in a decade.

Claire had only one or two memories of her father, which had made me feel responsible for making up for Patrick’s absence. I worried most about Claire, feeling wronged on her behalf.

“Aiden. Aiden. Aiden. What could you possibly need to say that you haven’t said in the ninety-seven text messages you’ve sent me since you moved?”

I resisted the impulse to give her an eye roll so dramatic it would have made Rennie proud. Claire loved making all aspects of her life as riveting as an HBO drama.

“I hardly think one text message every other day has added up to ninety-seven in just under two weeks, Claire.” My voice took on the father-figure inflection that I inevitably fell into with Claire.

Nine years between us had me thinking of her as a perma-teenager, despite her being in the final year of her master’s.

“Potato. Potahto. The fact that you know how often you text me shows you want to text me every day and stop yourself.”

“Not untrue,” I admitted. I did have a hard time not checking up on her to make sure she was okay. Old habits were hard to break. “I just wanted to make sure everything went okay with your tuition payment for the summer.”

“Geez, Aiden. I told you in the reply to text number seventy-three that I spent all of it on cocaine and online gambling.” Her reply had me releasing an audible sigh.

Pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers, I fought to release the tension building in my body. The headache that had been threatening to appear all day was creeping into my skull. Was it because Claire was a literal pain in the neck? Maybe.

“Claire. Be serious for four seconds and just tell me, please.”

She must’ve heard something in my tone that had her sobering. She practically whispered, “Yeah, Aid. I did, and thank you again. You know you don’t have to do this for me.”

“I do, and I want to. Though I need to get going. Can you give Mom my love? Love you, little sister.”

“Love you, big brother.” She disconnected the call.

I reached blindly into the desk drawer for some ibuprofen. I swallowed two capsules with the eight-hour-old bottle of warm water on my desk. The room temperature, stale flavor had me grimacing.

Allowing myself one moment to tip my head back against the headrest of my chair, I closed my eyes to gain control of my stress levels. There was so much to do before I could call it a day. Several teams were starting new campaigns that coming week, and I had to approve their proposal designs before tomorrow.

Willing away the pain in my head, I opened my eyes and brought my focus back to the document in front of me.

It was better that my family didn’t know that I wasn’t going home. What they didn’t know, they didn’t have to worry about. I preferred to do the worrying on their behalf.

If Aiden was surprised to be going on a business trip just over a month into our new working relationship, he certainly didn’t show it when he’d casually announced we’d be heading to LA the previous week. It had meant many hours of frantic bookings and scheduling for me.

Two days later, we were leaving for five days.

After the whirlwind of the past few weeks, I hadn’t even considered a trip. But Appeal had an opportunity to meet a group of philanthropists that Aiden had been pursuing to be the first to take part in the new NGO initiative.

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