Things were calm, my mind working effortlessly to bring me back safely, away from Ivanna’s Viking wet dream and her saccharine world. I was nearly there, watching myself sleep, turn beneath my white sheets, knocking over an empty tumbler on my bedside table—not the bourbon, thank God—and then, the alert of a video chat on my laptop blasted across the room.
Jani! Jani! The alarming scream of my brother’s voice shot through the slow retreat my mind made. Sam’s voice became a grating, loud yelp that made my chest constrict as my heart sped.
Jani! Jani, for the gods’ sake, wake up!
And I did, jerking from my sheets, sending my pillows shooting onto the floor and the thick gasp of air in my lungs coming out like a yelp.
“Shit!”
The bell alert from my laptop lying on the floor next to my bed kept ringing, that low, constant loop that announced an incoming video call. Sam hadn’t actually spoken to me, but still had a way of scaring the hell out me, nineteen hundred miles away. My brother could call to me, unannounced, whenever he wanted, but especially when I was unconscious. The annoying sibling connection was a nuisance I’d never be rid of.
“Stupid, intrusive…” My laptop flopped against the mattress when I picked it up and jammed my finger on the surface to accept the call. I didn’t bother letting my big brother explain a damn thing. “You asshole, I was in someone’s dream.”
“Well hey to you too, little sister.”
A quick glance at my cell phone to cut off the insistent text I knew Sam had sent me and I caught the time. Shit, someone was probably dead.
“Who died?” My brother’s small chuckle was the only thing that made me relax enough to leave the bed and tug on my jeans.
“No one yet, though I’m pretty close to killing your brother-in-law.” My brother always blamed me when shit hit the fan, and from his tone, I’d guessed that this time the shit had slammed into the proverbial fan in buckets.
Still, that wasn’t my fault. “Ronan is your brother-in-law too, Samedi.”
“Yeah.” The frustration was heavy in his voice at my using his full name. “Well Mai is your twin, Janiver, and since it’s her husband that started all this shit, it should be you that gets us out of it.”
Mai was younger than me by only four minutes, but somehow we were years apart. I always picked up the pieces when she let her world fall apart—like it was now, with her in the middle of a bad breakup with her lazy, perpetually cheating husband. Still, it wasn’t my fight.
“You’ve got the wrong twin.”
I cut Sam off from whatever excuse I knew he was going to use when he cleared his throat by shaking my head and reaching out to grab the bottle of bourbon that had been sitting on the table beside my bed. I took a deep pull on the bottle, despite the glare my brother gave me. “Ask Mai to work out this mess.”
“She can’t. She’s gone off the rails.”
That meant trouble. It was habit, something my twin did when she couldn’t handle the messes she’d made for herself.
“What…” A small exhale and I readied for the bad news I suspected was coming. “What do you mean?”
“She’s back at Papa’s and won’t come out of her room.”
“Circe help us.”
The bourbon didn’t burn when it went down, despite the long swig I took. My throat had grown numb to the sting of liquor a long damn time ago, and the small little noise of judgment Sam made got completely ignored. When you numb yourself in order to forget, something that had become one of my more practiced habits, you tend to get used to both the bite and the judgment, no matter where they come from.
Mai’s hiding away—my twin’s way of forgetting—wasn’t the worst of the situation. Not by a long damn shot.
“She caught him with that same stripper from last year.”
“The one with the pixie cut?”
“Yeah, whatever, but this time he didn’t bother begging Mai not to kick him out.” Sam leaned on his arm, rubbing the back of his neck. His complexion was darker than mine or Mai’s, taking on more of our mother’s Haitian creole features than our blue-eyed father’s French, but like both me and Mai, Sam had full lips and hazel eyes. We were all a good mix of both our parents. “Papa thought giving Ronan a job would maybe keep that asshole from running off for weeks at a time.” Sam looked tired, like he hadn’t bothered with sleep in days. My stomach tightened at the thought, and I couldn’t quite ignore the weight in my chest that settled there. My brother had enough to deal with. He didn’t need Mai’s jackass of a husband doubling up his anxiety.
“Bet that was pointless.”
“You got no idea.” Sam released one long exhale and scrubbed a hand against his fade at the back of his head. He’d abandoned the short afro he’d grown out the last time I saw him and looked more like himself. “He totally fucked us over.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“If Papa hadn’t let Ronan take care of so many clients when they came calling, none of this would have happened. He just botched up too many jobs, was too sloppy, and I was too busy to notice that his haplessness had become a serious problem.”
The whole time he had been talking to me, Sam had kept looking at his cell phone. It wasn’t like him to let a text distract him. The string of beeps coming from his phone was odd, but the expression on his face was almost funny. Almost.
“The whole damn town
