Page 45 of The Heartbreakers
I rolled my eyes but secretly agreed. Oliver seemed nothing short of composed. Although Paul said I didn’t need to take pictures today, I reached for my camera on the coffee table. “You don’t ever get stage fright?” I asked as I focused the lens. He smirked and I snapped a picture.
“Never,” he said, and then he returned to his meditation. As I took a few more shots, Xander flopped down on the couch next to me.
“He’s a liar,” Xander said. I turned my camera on him and found him in the viewfinder. “We all get nervous before shows.”
“I can imagine,” I said and took a few rapid-fire pictures. “There are like a bazillion people out there.” Pulling away, I hit the playback button and chuckled. Because of my proximity, Xander’s glasses made him look bug-eyed.
“Mind if I look? I never got to see the pictures from the other weekend.”
“Sure.”
For the next few minutes he scrolled through our night in Chicago, grinning and laughing at the memories we’d made. He reached the last picture and, not knowing it was the end of the footage, continued to scroll. Cara flashed onto the tiny screen.
“Oh, sorry,” Xander said when he realized he’d gone too far, but then he was squinting down at the photo.
It was from the day Cara and I had made up. We spent the afternoon playing Rummy 500, and I’d captured her at the perfect moment—she had been looking over the top of her hand, cards splayed out like a fan, and then she stuck her tongue out at me.
I brushed my hair off my shoulder and braced myself for the questions I knew would come.
“It’s okay,” I told him and gently took my camera back.
Xander cleared his throat. “She isn’t you.”
That much was obvious. Since her diagnosis, Cara’s once-tan skin had faded to a dull wash of gray. Even more noticeable was how the cancer had carved away her face, leaving behind sharp cheekbones and deep-set eyes.
“It’s my sister,” I said, my voice soft.
“She’s sick.” He said it as a statement, but I knew he was asking.
A lump started to swell inside my throat, but I forced it back down. “Cara has lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s.”
Xander pulled the glasses off his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. “When you said your sister was sick, I thought you meant the stomach flu or something.”
So he hadn’t heard. I peeked up at Alec. He was still standing against the wall with his headphones in, but now his gaze was focused on Xander and me. His foot had stopped tapping, and I knew he was listening to our conversation.
“You didn’t say anything,” I said, looking Alec dead in the eye. “Why not?”
Alec looked hesitant about answering, but he took a quick breath and said in his deep voice, “That’s your story to tell. Not mine.”
“Wait? How’d he know?” Xander asked as he squinted at his friend.
In spite of myself, I smiled. “Accidentally. He asked about my photography and it just sorta slipped out.”
Xander bobbed his head. “No surprise there.” Then he leaned in and whispered so Alec couldn’t hear us. “People always seem to tell him their secrets. I think it’s because they know he’ll never say anything.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. A short stretch of silence passed, and then a sigh escaped my lips. “Well,” I said, clasping my hands together in my lap, “now you know the real reason why Cara didn’t come to the autograph signing.”
Instead of saying he was sorry, Xander wrapped an arm around me and pulled me to his side, our shoulders bumping against one another. It was a surprisingly forward gesture, but a comforting one.
“You two look freaky similar,” he said after a quiet moment.
“That’s because we’re identical twins.” Well, identical except for the fact that she was sick and I was healthy.
“But you’re also triplets? How does that work?”
“We’re dizygotic triplets,” I said. I’d explained this so many times before that now I probably sounded like a textbook. “It’s when two separate eggs are fertilized, and one subsequently divides into two.”
“So that makes Drew your fraternal twin?”
