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  “Oh, right,” she agreed. “Just let me grab my bag.” I fought the urge to replay her sentence over and over in my mind to analyze its pieces and determine whether I detected a hint of disappointment in it, while Amanda momentarily disappeared into the apartment and returned with one of those tiny, impractical clutch purses that couldn’t possibly hold more than a cell phone. I often wondered why women carried such things. Then, I would see a dress like the one that Amanda was wearing in that moment, and I would realize that there truly was no place to keep anything. Having a pocket or something would completely hide her amazing curves, and call me crazy, but I really didn’t want anything hiding those curves from my wandering eyes.

  What I liked most about Amanda—and there were many, many things to like—was that she seemed perpetually up for anything. Once we had gotten in my car, I asked her if it was okay to put the top down. It was a question I had asked many women with varying degrees of success. Most liked the idea of the convertible, but didn’t want to mess up their hair. But not Amanda. She was thrilled to feel the wind blowing through her hair, and seemed to become even more animated the faster I drove, which was unexpected, but completely welcome and exhilarating. The fact was, she had changed in the years that had passed; she was still the same young, beautiful woman that she had always been, but now she lacked the shyness that used to patrol her actions. She was the same amazing girl, but now more confident, which was a sexy look on her. All of these womanly changes made her impossible to resist.

  Ten

  Amanda

  I’m not stupid. When I made the decision to move to New York and work at Dawson and Fisher, I knew that I would inevitably see Matt Dawson. There was obviously more than a small part of me that wanted to simply pick up where we left off nine years ago, and pretend like nothing had happened in the intervening years. But there was a larger, somewhat smarter part of me that knew just how impossible and dangerous that was. Not only had I been raising a little boy that bore a striking resemblance to his father, but nine years is a very long time. People change; they grow. I had done both.

  And yet, when I was getting ready for my evening with Matt, I didn’t feel as if I had grown very much. In fact, just the opposite—I felt like a high school girl getting ready for a date with the popular track star in a teen movie, wondering if he liked me, psyching myself up to believe that he did.

  When you add to that the fact that I hadn’t had an adult night out in a while, what you had was a recipe for overdoing it. When I put the dress on my body, and did my hair and makeup, I was feeling plenty confident, but the moment I heard him knock on the door, all of my confidence faded and I considered changing again. I realized too late that I had dressed for a date, rather than a dinner with an old friend, and could feel my pulse begin to race with the knowledge that he was on the other side of the door waiting for me to open it.

  I set to work undoing the locks. There were five in all—two deadbolts, two chains, and the doorknob. To an outside observer, it probably looked like the door of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the fact was, the only neighborhoods I could afford to live in were sketchy at best, and I was going to do whatever it took to keep Aaron and myself safe. I didn’t really give a damn how crazy it looked to the outside world.

  When I did finally get the door open, and saw Matt standing there casually like he just walked off the set of a GQ photo shoot, I nearly fainted. The man had always looked good, for sure, but there was something exceptionally hot about him now that made me unable to control my own base impulses. Eager to see him without that expensive suit covering his fit body, I invited him inside, and was quickly rejected.

  “I don’t want to be late for our reservation,” was what he said. But what I heard was something more like, “I don’t want to fuck you because you have given birth to a child and now it is gross for me to think about you as a sexual being.” I cringed at the sound of rejection, but tried not to think about it too much. It was for the best, I had to remind myself. More than anything, I simply wanted to have a nice evening with this very handsome man who was here to pick me up and do exactly that. Trying to analyze every word he said to figure out why he didn’t want to sleep with me sounded like the opposite of fun. So, I tried my best to shut off that part of my brain.

  But damn, he looked good… far too good for a single mom. I found myself wondering what kind of women Matt usually dated, but once I got a picture in my brain, I tried to push it away just as quickly. That wasn’t a healthy game to play. And besides, I was more than just a single mom. I was a hot, young attorney. I was a fucking catch.

  In the grand scheme of things, Matt hadn’t changed all that much. He was older, sure, but age had been good to him. He probably still ran every morning, if I had to guess. He was addicted to the feeling that he got while running, even back when I met him. He looked good running, and running looked good on him, giving him those powerful legs that made some really complicated sex positions easy.

  He still drove an Audi. It was a newer, sexier Audi, but an Audi just the same. And he still liked to drive it fast, listening for my squeals of joy as a cue to press even harder on the gas. With the top down and the wind in my hair, driving through the city was exhilarating. I didn’t even know where we were going—Matt had planned everything, but I trusted him, and I was having fun already, so as long as we got there together, I didn’t really care where we ended up.

  It turned out to be a restaurant with a high price tag and about a hundred people waiting for a table. It was one of those swanky places with low lighting and paparazzi on the corner, trying to catch a glimpse of any celebrity who might enter. We were not celebrities, obviously, but somehow, Matt got us to jump to the front of the line, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little impressed.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked him once we were seated at one of the funky steel tables.

  “Do what?”

  Clearly, he was going to play it cool and act like he had no idea what I was talking about, but the smirk that threatened at the corners of his mouth said otherwise.

  “Don’t play,” I said. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Is the hostess an ex or something?”

  He laughed at me then, and his laugh was more than a little infuriating. “No,” he said, shaking his head furiously. “And if she were, we’d probably get moved to the back of the line just for kicks.”

  “How’d you get us in then?”

  “I did a favor for the owner a few months back.”

  “A favor?” I teased. I hoped it was a favor like buying coffee and not a sexual favor. I knew I had no right to know or care either way, but for a million reasons that I couldn’t quite articulate, I felt very possessive of Matt.

  “I got his wife into the country,” he said.

  This surprised me. “You do immigration?” I asked. “I thought the firm only handles corporate law.”

  “I do what needs to be done,” he explained. “When people need help, I find it very hard to say no.”

  If I weren’t already smitten with Matt Dawson all over again, that statement would have sealed the deal. There are few things that are more frustrating than someone that you know you can’t have saying exactly the thing that would make you fall for them. I smiled at him for a long moment after he said that, thinking about the implications of what he had done. America’s immigration process was long and needlessly complicated, and he navigated it in order to bring together two people who loved each other. I wondered how many other lawyers would be willing to do the same.

  “That is very nice of you,” I said finally. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his. I felt like I was falling into them, and I had no desire to catch myself.

  But Matt shrugged off my compliment. “You’d do it too,” he said.

  I thought about it. I supposed he was right. When I began studying law, I had a lot of lofty ideas about why I was doing it. I never thought that I’d be finding tax loopholes for wealthy corporations. I wanted to hel
p people and change the world, but no one was hiring revolutionaries. So, there I was at Dawson and Fisher, doing exactly the kind of work I hated. When it comes down to it, you have to find a way to pay the bills. At least it wasn’t a bad firm to work for. I had already heard horror stories from some of the people I graduated with about the places they’d been hired. Still, Matt’s actions definitely didn’t seem like the kind of thing my brother Brian would do. Or approve of.

  “Did you do that with the firm?” I asked Matt.

  His chagrined reaction to my question let me know that he had not. He looked around the restaurant as if to make sure that Brian did not have spies in the room. I almost laughed until he said “holy shit! And ducked his head.

  I leaned in conspiratorially. “I won’t tell,” I whispered loudly.

  “That’s not it,” Matt explained. “Your brother is here.”

  I whipped my head around quickly to see what Matt was looking at. Sure enough, Brian was at a table about thirty feet away. I shrugged. I wasn’t sure why Matt was making such a big deal out of it.

  “We’re not sneaking around,” I told him. “Brian literally asked you to take me out tonight.” Sneaking around had characterized so much of our relationship in the past—if it could even be called a relationship—that Matt must have somehow formed a semi-Pavlovian reaction to seeing my brother when he was out with me. But we weren’t doing anything wrong. We were just out to dinner. I didn’t understand the secrecy. If anyone should be hiding his head in this situation, it should be Brian. After all, he’d told me he couldn’t hang out because he was working—not because he was going to be hanging out in swanky restaurants.

  “I know that,” he explained. “But that’s not Megan at the table with him.”

  Eleven

  Matt

  I was sure that after Brian and I had talked about how he was screwing up his marriage earlier in the week that he would have done the right thing and ended his relationship with his mistress. What was her name? Valerie?

  But no. There she was, sitting across from him in what was probably one of the hottest new restaurants in the city, holding hands across the table like stupid teenagers who had nothing to lose.

  I could only hope that this time I would be able to get by without him seeing me in return. Being put in the constant position of judging him for his infidelity was starting to stress me out in ways that I hadn’t even considered, and the fact that he wasn’t even trying to be discreet about it suggested that he didn’t particularly care.

  “I’m calling Megan.” Amanda announced indignantly. She was already reaching for her phone.

  Instinctively, I reached out to stop her, holding her hand under my palm.

  “No,” I said, before realizing that I sounded like a father scolding a child. Amanda’s shocked expression told me that I had messed up. She froze, and stared straight through me before throwing my hand off of her own.

  I could see the wheels turning in her head as she decided how to respond. When she did, it was in a low, serious voice that only I could hear. “Do not talk to me like that,” she said. “I am not your daughter or your sister, and you don’t get to scold me. I get enough of that from Brian and my family.”

  I apologized quickly, explaining that my mouth had been moving faster than my brain. She listened, then nodded and took a deep breath before she spoke again, her voice returning to its normal timbre.

  “Now, why can’t I tell Megan that my asshole brother is cheating on her?”

  There were a million reasons that doing so was a bad idea, and I was sure that if Amanda had stopped to think for a moment, she would have realized several of them. But I started with the most obvious one.

  “Because you’ll piss him off,” I said simply.

  We both knew what Brian was like when he was pissed. It wasn’t pretty. I had seen him start a number of fights with idiots in bars who looked at him funny, and I could only imagine what Amanda had seen over the years as his sister. Since she was so much younger than him, I had assumed that she had been spared much of his wrath. After all, he was already a teenager by the time she was born. But the face that she made when I reminded her what he could be like let me know that she hadn’t escaped it completely, and as I looked at her over the table, it made me wonder what exactly she had endured. Amanda was a tough young woman, but I had never really considered that something—or someone—had made her that way. The thought made me shudder.

  “What is it?” I asked her softly, reading the expression on her face.

  “It’s nothing,” she lied. “Do you mind if we leave?”

  I watched as the incredible, powerful, and strong woman I had picked up for dinner was reduced to a ball of fear and insecurity, and in that moment, I hated Brian. I knew that sibling relationships were complicated, but he had done something to her. I knew it. And when I found out what it was, I was going to confront him about it. For so long I had been trying to protect our friendship and our partnership like it was a fragile thing that needed to be nurtured, but the fact was, I should have ended it years ago when I met Amanda. It would have been so much easier than it was going to be now.

  I didn’t say any of this to Amanda. She didn’t need to have the extra burden of feeling like she was responsible for what was going to happen. Instead, I took her by the hand, and led her quietly out of the restaurant, needing so badly to protect her, but feeling somewhat unable to do so.

  When the valet brought my car again, and she had climbed back into the relative safety of its interior, Amanda apologized.

  “I didn’t like that place much anyway,” I told her. It didn’t matter if this was true or not. It was true enough for now.

  “No. I mean, I’m sorry I never told you.”

  “About Brian? Fuck. There’s always been a part of me that knew what a creep he was. I’ve seen the way he treats Megan. Even before he was cheating on her. He is so fucking controlling and I never spoke up about it beca—”

  She cut me off. “No,” she said, reaching out to touch my hand gently in an effort to quiet my rant. “I mean about Aaron.”

  I was confused. “Who is Aaron?” I asked her blankly.

  “My son,” she said. She didn’t move her hand a centimeter as she spoke. This simple contact aroused feelings in me that I didn’t dare acknowledge, and I didn’t want to have this conversation in that moment. I wanted to talk about anything else. The weather. The law. Movies. I didn’t care. But I didn’t want to talk about Amanda’s son. And while there was a part of me deep inside that knew exactly why I didn’t want to have that conversation with her, I had managed to drown out that voice with other, louder, internal voices until I could deny its existence completely. Amanda was not about to let me do that.

  “Your son,” she continued.

  And there it was, out in the open, laying in front of me like a piece of raw meat on an otherwise empty plate, impossible to ignore or avoid. And my reaction? Shaking my head like some sort of tantrum-throwing child.

  I needed to drive. We were still sitting in front of the stupid restaurant, which only made me think of how our evening had begun—Amanda in a sexy dress, me trying to impress her. All of that was gone now, and we were forced to live with the decisions we had made nearly a decade earlier. I was completely consumed with the need to drive. And since Amanda was in the passenger seat, she was coming with me. Not because I needed her in that moment, but because opening the door and letting her get out was more than I could handle. So, I didn’t say anything to her. I simply turned the key, pressed on the gas, and disappeared down the road in a flash of black paint and lights.

  Twelve

  Amanda

  I didn’t know how I thought Matt would respond to learning that he was Aaron’s father. But I can honestly say that I did not think that his reaction would be to speed to his condo, yank me out of the car, and have my clothes off before we made it to the bed. And I can say that I had no idea that I would be so willing and eager to join him.


  I’ll admit, I was afraid at first. I had spent the better part of my life around a man who would fly off the handle at everything and anything; that man being Brian. My brother had seemingly decided that it was his mission on the earth to make sure that the women in his life—namely, myself and my quiet, meek mother—knew their place in the hierarchy of the family. When I broke a glass, as all children inevitably did at some point, I’d be locked in my room without dinner. And even when I was tiny, if I found my way into Brian’s teenager bedroom, I’d be sure to get swatted and sent on my way… or worse.

  At the same time, I always found it hard to blame Brian for his behavior, even going too far as to justify it in my head. My father had apparently been even worse, subjecting my mother and Brian to nightly rage-blackouts and beatings. Obviously, I hadn’t been born yet, so I was lucky enough to have never experienced them, but from what my mother had told me, they were nightmarish. My father left when I was just three years old, leaving Brian as the patriarch of the family. It was a role he took in stride, seeming to transform into a mini-version of my father… later to become a full-blown adult version of him.

  I often wondered how bad my father must have really been, and the mental scarring that had left on my brother. It was the reason that I was always unable to blame Brian for the way he acted. In a way, it wasn’t his fault… he was a victim just as I was.

  And it wasn’t even like I was a victim. In fact, the way Brian used to treat me and my mother made me a stronger person. And when I was old enough to fight back, I did. But it had still made me wary of the unpredictable nature of men, and had ensured that I would raise my own child very, very differently.