Secrets We Whisper in the Moonlight (Decisions in Durham Book 2) Read online

  It was supposed to be us forever. The end.

  But that wasn’t reality. These men of mine would eventually settle down. Should want to settle down. Of course they would.

  Of course Jonah would.

  Of course he would find someone and fall in love with them and move in together and start a family and . . .

  I felt faint. The color drained from my face and pooled somewhere around the vicinity of my toes, making them hot and twitchy . . . and why were my toes even hot? That was a weird reaction . . .

  But the worst part of all of this was not that Jonah, Will, and Charlie would find someone. It was that I wasn’t so sure I would.

  The pangs of loneliness from earlier intensified until they seemed to cut whole gashes straight through my gut.

  I was alone.

  I might always be alone.

  And the people I was counting on to be alone with me were suddenly not such a sure deal.

  “Are you okay?” Jonah asked from the other side of the desk.

  A ringing sounded in my ears, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis right in front of my eyes.

  “It’s weird,” I managed weakly, trying to cover my existential crisis by agreeing with him. “I mean, mostly, it’s fine. I’m happy Will is happy too. And Lola is way out of his league, so he would be absolutely moronic not to marry her. But . . . yeah, I never thought this day would come.” My practiced sarcasm helped me shake off the fear of being a lonely old spinster for the rest of my life, and I was able to smile and hold Jonah’s gaze when I said, “Our little Will is all grown up.”

  Jonah crossed his arms sullenly. “I don’t like it, Eliza. It’s the end of an era.”

  His depressed tone and pouty scowl were more entertaining than any show I was currently watching. I leaned forward and held his gaze. “You still have me, Mason. I don’t know what there is to complain about.”

  He stared back. His gray-blue eyes twinkled, and he worked hard to suppress a smile threatening to poke out at the corners. “Well, I guess that’s something.”

  I winked at him. “More than something. You only lost Will, and he’s second place at best.” Lifting one hand, I tossed my long, dark hair over my shoulder and said, “Everybody knows I’m the real English prize.”

  “That’s true,” he said, finally giving in to a rumbly laugh. “Everybody knows that.”

  I smiled wider, happy he didn’t shoot down my obvious jokes. “Thank you.”

  “So do I get to take the number one English to lunch today?” He shrugged casually. “Street tacos and liquor lists?”

  My eyebrows crinkled together over my nose. Hadn’t he just turned Will down because of his busy day? I could joke all I wanted about being the first-place English sibling, but I knew better than that. He’d walked in here moping about losing his friendship with Will. I wasn’t first place. Not really. I was a consolation prize.

  “I thought you had a busy day? Didn’t you just turn down Will for his weird estate sale adventure?”

  Some light faded from his face, and his eyes narrowed in thought. “Well, yeah, but I didn’t want to rifle through some dead guy’s booze. Tacos are different. They’re delicious. And not musty.”

  “At least you hope so,” I teased. “Nobody wants a musty taco.”

  We both realized what I’d said at the same time. It was impossible to grow up with brothers and not constantly hear words and phrases in the most perverted way possible.

  Jonah’s head tipped back as a burst of laughter rolled out of him. His whole body joined in, shaking from head to toe. His hair hung over his shoulders. And his eyes closed and crinkled at the corners.

  God, he was so good-looking. How had he not found his Lola first?

  My cheeks felt as though they were bright red, and I could hardly meet his amused gaze when he finally stopped laughing at me.

  “I don’t think truer words have ever been spoken, Liza. Nobody wants to eat a musty taco.”

  I pointed a finger at him. “I didn’t say anything about eating. That was all you.”

  He waggled his eyebrows and shrugged again, but it was good-natured and relaxed this time. He was such a cad.

  Well, okay, I wasn’t sure if cads still existed in this day and age. But if they did, he was their leader. The king cad. Probably breaking hearts and embarrassing women every day.

  He lifted his arms over his head, stretching. His shirt pulled up, revealing a thin sliver of his hard stomach. I allowed myself a peek, but just a quick one. “So no lunch?” he asked.

  “Not today, Mason. I don’t want to be stuck here all night, so I have to actually work today.”

  He stood and walked to the edge of my desk, straightening one of my picture frames. It had a snapshot Mom had taken of Charlie, Will, and me when we were kids at the park. I was sitting on a swing, my long dark hair a tangled mess around my shoulders. Charlie had somehow wedged his feet into the swing under my butt and stood behind me, tongue sticking out and nose wrinkled. And Will was standing on the swing next to us. He had been swinging it side to side, and my mom had caught the moment when his swing had sidled directly next to ours. We looked so happy.

  And I supposed at that moment we were. My dad had been in a dark mood that day, and my mom had taken us to the park to escape his cutting words and booming rage. She was probably as tired of walking on eggshells and defusing mood bombs as we had been. The picture didn’t show how we’d all cried the whole way there. Or that I had forgotten my jacket in our rush to leave the house and I was freezing.

  It was one of my favorite pictures because it perfectly summed up our childhood. Simultaneously painful and beautiful.

  The three of us together.

  “You okay, Eliza? You’re kind of quiet today.” He tapped the desk with a long finger, snapping me out of my childhood memories.

  I looked up at him, a small smile tugging at my lips. “Just thinking. You put me in a weird headspace with all your talk about Will getting serious with Lola. Now I feel like I’m losing my brother, and my whole world’s ending. That’s all your fault.”

  He smiled at my blatant teasing and leaned over me, resting his weight on his hands. “Chin up, English. You still got me.”

  Holding his gaze, I wondered if that was true. But I liked that he’d echoed my sentiment from a couple of minutes ago, making our friendship feel solid. Important. “Good.”

  We stood there a second longer, searching for the truth in the other person’s face. His eyes were a deep, dark blue that twinkled when he was happy and clouded when he was upset or mad. His driver’s license claimed gray eyes, but that was because Jonah hadn’t taken the time to thoroughly examine their nuanced color.

  Not like I had.

  I used to be mildly obsessed with his shifting eye color. Okay, probably more than mildly. But those days were long behind me. Back when I would wear short shorts to get his attention and pretend to love college basketball just so he would notice me.

  Now I actually enjoyed college basketball, but it was only after countless hours of pretending that I appreciated the sport.

  “Good,” he repeated, pulling back into himself and releasing me from his hypnotic charm.

  “Come back tomorrow if you want,” I told him when he stepped toward the door. “I’ll go to lunch with you then.”

  “I have a new account meeting tomorrow. But I’ll take you to dinner if you ask nicely.”

  I batted my eyelashes at him playfully, “Please?”

  “God, I’m a sucker for those green eyes,” he said smoothly.

  I didn’t think that was true, but I had been pulling the puppy-dog eyes and please on him since I wore a training bra.

  “You pick the place,” I told him, ignoring his comment. He wasn’t serious. At least not in the way an average woman would hope that he was. “And you can drive too. I’ll be ready to go around seven. Just in case you want to make reservations.”

  “You’re so bossy, English. Why do I put up with any of
this?”

  “Because you love me, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” he muttered before he abruptly left my office, tapping the doorframe on his way out. I stared after the place he’d occupied just seconds earlier, wondering what all that was about. Jonah had been cool and confident for as long as I could remember. He never worried about anything.

  Least of all, his friendship with Will.

  But I had been where he was more times than I wanted to count. Okay, maybe not with my ride-or-die BFF because that top spot was reserved for my brothers and Jonah. But I had girlfriends once upon a time. A lot of them, especially in my early twenties. Yet, one by one, they’d all disappeared into the mysterious abyss of love and matrimony. Girlfriends from my pre-Craft days, old high school friends, even my close friend Daria, who I’d randomly met at a speeding ticket forgiveness class when I was twenty-one. We’d been so perfectly matched as friends and had enjoyed two solid years of inseparable hilarity. Then she’d met the one, fallen hard and fast, and slowly but surely disappeared from my life.

  I thought it was the Curse of the Bridesmaid. The urban legend turned reality in my own life where once you stood up with someone at their wedding, the friendship was doomed to die. I’d lived out that scenario too many times. Apparently, I made an excellent bridesmaid but not a great long-term friend.

  It had given me a sort of standoffish approach to women in general. But thankfully, I had Will, Charlie, and Jonah to fall back on.

  Although now I worried Jonah and I would experience that with Will too. It hurt to even think about. If Will fell into the marriage black hole, it wouldn’t be quite so easy to bounce back from.

  I let out a slow, stabilizing breath and was determined to get back to work. I had a lot of routine work to do today, but I had also made a New Year’s resolution about building a stronger social media presence for the bar. It wasn’t something I felt particularly qualified to manage, but it technically fell under my umbrella of responsibility.

  We were pulling in great numbers, and we seemed to have a good mix of new clientele every weekend. But this part of me couldn’t help but fear the day we opened, and nobody came in. Every other bar in Durham seemed to have this successful and creative online presence. I knew that was exaggerated insecurity. But currently, our Instagram account only had three pictures, and they were all from opening day. It was a little embarrassing.

  I opened my phone to scroll through my different social media accounts, hoping for inspiration, when Ada knocked on my door. I looked up, thankful for a distraction. I was three seconds into my social media research and already defeated.

  “Jonah wasn’t here very long,” she said by way of greeting.

  A shrug pushed my shoulders up, but I halted halfway through my indifference. Ada was never casual about anything, but least of all Jonah.

  “Yeah, I don’t know. He was in a weird mood,” I said, keeping my voice purposely flat. She leaned against the doorframe, folding her arms over her cropped sweater. This was a move she pulled on everyone—where she just waited it out, still and stoic, until the other person cracked. It worked one hundred percent of the time. “He was all bummed about Will being in a serious relationship.” I stared at my computer screen, pretending to click through only God knew what.

  I hated that it was that easy to get me to crack. But truthfully, Ada was some kind of Jedi mind manipulation master. She was all serious and comfortable with silence. Where the rest of the normal population, or at least me, preferred to fill any kind of pause in a conversation with rambling nonsense.

  She reacted differently than I expected, though. Blowing a puff of air from her lips, she kicked her toe against the recently mopped tile floor and said, “Yeah, it’s new for all of us.”

  My fingers hovered over my keyboard. “Don’t tell me you’re going to be weird about it too. You like Lola.”

  She waved a hand in front of her face. “Obviously, I like Lola. Everybody likes Lola. She’s unfairly endearing.”

  I bugged my eyes at her. “So what is it then?”

  She shrugged, her shoulders bunching up around her chin and staying there. “I don’t know. It kind of feels like everything is changing all at once, doesn’t it? Like we had this great thing going . . . and now . . .” She huffed another breath out. “I overheard them talking about opening a second location before Christmas.”

  My eyes narrowed. “You heard who talking?”

  She swallowed, and I could tell it took some effort. “Lola and Will. He was picking her brain about opening another bar and what it would entail. He mentioned a spot near one of Ezra Baptiste’s new restaurants that just went up for sale. He seemed anxious to talk to a real estate agent. I need to know, Eliza. Are y’all talking about breaking up the bar?”

  three

  My stomach hollowed out at the very thought of us splitting up the bar. “Will hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

  Her chin dipped knowingly. She had known she was going to get that confirmation from me but needed it anyway. “Or Charlie.”

  Well, Ada was the only one who was surprised by that. But how could Will not have said anything to me? Before Lola, I had been the person he talked to about everything. And if not me, then Jonah. And Jonah would have said something to me.

  Anger and betrayal simmered in my chest. I tried to hold them at bay until I had the full story, but they spit and hissed like hot grease in a pan.

  Ada noticed my clenched jaw and balled fists. Or maybe it was the way I was practically vibrating with restrained rage . . . Either way, she held up a hand between us like a stop sign. “I didn’t say anything until now because I knew you would overreact.”

  “Overreact?” I asked slowly.

  She went on like I hadn’t said anything. “And I was hoping he was going to say something to you. But obviously, he hasn’t and—”

  “And?”

  Her mouth opened and closed as she tried to figure out how to talk me off this ledge. Usually, Ada was the fiercest fighter for peace between my brothers and me. She treated mediation like a second job. It didn’t take a whole lot to get us at each other’s throats, so it probably was for her own peace and quiet. But this was beyond our normal scuffles.

  So far beyond.

  “I’m sure he can explain,” she finally said. “And I’m sure he was only using his girlfriend’s wealth of knowledge about these things to just . . . get a bigger picture before he brought it up to you. He wouldn’t do anything without you, Eliza. Especially not that.”

  I wanted her to be right. The words sounded right as they hovered in the air over our heads. They sounded like exactly what I needed to hear.

  But something in them rang false.

  This bar, Craft, was owned by Will, Charlie, and me. It had been Will’s idea when we’d been given my dad’s surprise inheritance. Once we’d conceptualized the idea, we’d all immediately agreed that it was the best thing ever and we should do it.

  But going about it had been slower than we’d expected. And getting the three of us to agree on anything had been nearly impossible. The location. The style. The name. The list of things we disagreed on went on and on.

  There had been one pivotal night at the end of a very long day. Will and Charlie had been ready to rip each other apart for weeks. Finally, Charlie had had enough of Will lording his more responsible track record over Charlie’s less-than-blameless head, and he’d stormed out in a huff. Charlie had sworn he’d never go into business with either of us, and he would keep his third of the money and move to Bali and “screw Dad!” or some nonsense like that. Will had finally pushed him over the just-go-live-on-the-beach-somewhere-and-go-fishing-and-surfing-every-day edge.

  Will and I had started drinking the second he was gone. Both of us were exhausted with the process of opening a business that required a liquor license with our dad’s money and learning how to tolerate each other in a professional environment on a daily basis.

  We were working on our third sh
eet in three sheets to the wind when he confided that he had a backup plan if this all went south. If Charlie and I didn’t want to do things Will’s way, he was going to do it on his own. He’d been approved for a business loan to supplement mine and Charlie’s third. He had the name, the philosophy, and even the location.

  After another beer, he even admitted that he might do it alone anyway. He would make a whole lot more money if he didn’t have to split it with us. Life would be a whole lot simpler if he didn’t have to run everything by us. He would be a whole lot happier on his own without us.

  I’d played it off so he would keep spilling his guts, but I’d been heartbroken. Will didn’t usually get that drunk . . . but it had been a stressful time in our lives, and the strange pain of losing our dad, even though we mostly hated him, had left us raw and prickly.

  By morning, Charlie had calmed down and showed up with bagels and coffees as his way of an apology. Will had gotten over the brunt of his anger too. We decided later that day on the name Craft and on this location.

  Will never mentioned his solo plans again.

  And I never mentioned that I knew Craft was his original idea, and this was the location he’d planned to use with or without us.

  Back then, I couldn’t see the point of fighting about something that would never happen.

  But now, Ada’s revelation brought it back into the light. Will was better at saving than Charlie and I were. He always had been. But he also lived above the bar, so he didn’t have the expenses that Charlie and I did, living on our own. His rent and utilities were included with the main expenses of the bar. We deducted a portion of his salary to cover his personal costs. Still, we also let him get away with whatever he wanted because he was basically on call twenty-four seven since he lived here.

  Meaning he just might have the capital to open a bar on his own. And if he was serious about Lola—who came from her own level of success and money—he might want a more stable situation. Aka a bigger paycheck.

  Or maybe it was something they wanted to do together. With Will’s experience in the bar scene, Lola’s extensive business résumé, and her family’s financial backing . . . they could do whatever they wanted without Charlie and me.