Chapter 20
JEREMIAH
“Yeah, I suppose you’d have to have been dead yourself to have missed the news just after it happened,” I responded to Stephanie, surprising myself by not shutting down the topic of Jack’s death immediately.
She nodded, but I didn’t feel any of the false pity or sympathy from her as I usually did when anyone brought up that time of my life. “It was a bit of a circus, wasn’t it?”
I chuckled, waiting for the resentment or the melancholy I usually felt when thinking about Jack to surface. Strangely, it wasn’t there. I arched a brow, lowering my chin as I turned to look at Stephanie. “A bit? It was more like a full-on carnival.”
She smiled, tilting her head as she acquiesced. “That’s a pretty accurate description. I remember wondering if he really even could’ve known all the people who were coming out as his ‘good friends’ to give interviews.”
“And all the girls who were devastated over the loss of their love.” I smiled, remembering how every second women in the state came out declaring she’d been in a secret relationship with him.
“I’d forgotten about that,” Stephanie said. “Was any of it true?”
I shook my head, thinking back to a conversation Jack and I had shortly before he went on that trip. Some magazine had both of us on their “most eligible” list, and we drank beer and stated all the qualities that made us very much ineligible. “He would’ve thought it was hilarious hearing all it.”
“Yeah?” Stephanie was sitting on the arm of the couch in my office, her lips pulled into a soft smile.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, leaning against my desk. “Making fun of all the ways the tabloids got it wrong was one of his hobbies.”
“You’ve gotta laugh about it I guess, to keep sane. It has to be better than the alternative.”
I very nearly gawked at her. She was exactly right, though very few people would’ve put it together that well, that fast. “That’s what we used to say. I miss that about him, the way he looked at the world.”
When I was younger, aggravated by the lies the press told about my family or me, Jack was the one who pointed out the funny, the downright ridiculous and the amusing about their stories. As I learned to let it roll off of me, to not give a fuck, he was also the one who stressed how important it was we stayed in touch with what people were saying about us.
“If he turned that into a hobby, I bet there’s a lot more you miss about him,” Stephanie said, gently prodding me to keep talking. And so I did. I told her about some of the things I missed, the exploits we used to get up to that never made it to the press.
I was surprised with myself for talking so openly about my brother with a borderline stranger. Even with my father, we barely spoke a word of it after Jack was buried. He was laid to rest beside our mother, who died when we were young.
My dad and I stayed at the gravesite a little longer than the rest of the people who attended his funeral, saying our quiet goodbyes. At the wake, we listened to stories shared about him by his friends and business acquaintances, but we didn’t join in the reminiscing.
After that day, we only mentioned him in passing sometimes. It felt good to talk about him, think back on the good memories. So much of the time I only resented him for leaving me to this life—where I had to fill Jack’s shoes.
Stephanie listened to my memories, sweet and kind. We laughed at our misadventures, and as I’d come to expect from her, inserted bits of her own humor into her comments.
“It’s not easy to lose the people we love.” She spoke when I fell silent, really thinking about my brother for the first time in a long time.
I sensed from the way the humor in her eyes fell to the wayside that she spoke from experience. “Who was it for you?”
“No one died,” she said quietly, her eyes turning down. She played with the hem of her dress, twisting it around her fingers before lifting those ice blue eyes back to mine. “They’re alive, but I lost my parents a couple of years ago.”
I frowned, not quite understanding. “Are they sick or something?”
She shook her head, her gaze darting to the skyline behind me as though she couldn’t say what she had to while looking at me. “They abandoned me because I wasn’t like them. I haven’t heard from them since.”
“What happened?” It was my turn to listen now, and as another surprise, I actually wanted to hear what she had to say. I wanted to know what happened to her, how she was still so sassy and full of life when I could see the weight of her parents’ abandonment weighing heavily on her shoulders.
She shrugged, still not quite meeting my eyes. “I come from a family of strict rule followers. I’m an only child, but my parents, their siblings and my cousins, they’ve all got these massive sticks up their asses.”
I gave a little snort of laughter, which earned me a smile before she continued. “None of them ever put a toe out of line. I’m not exaggerating when I say they have bathroom breaks scheduled.”
“Sounds tedious.” I knew a little something about having a family member like that. MJ could account for every second of my father’s day. I got the feeling her story was about to take a darker turn though, it had to given how she’d started it.
She nodded. “Tedious is one word to describe it, I suppose. Oppressive, boring, predictable, mundane. There are some more words for you.”
I wouldn’t say it out loud, but Stephanie didn’t strike me as fitting that mold at all. Since the moment I met her, she surprised me, kept me on my toes. “Thank you. At least now I know I shouldn’t get you a thesaurus for your birthday.”