She easily recognized Kyle Rhodes, an extremely wealthy computer genius turned businessman who’d originally shot to fame after hacking into Twitter when his then-girlfriend, a Victoria’s Secret model, tweeted a video of herself cheating on him with a movie star. Like most Chicagoans, Brooke had followed all the media drama surrounding his arrest and conviction—not realizing that one day she would have a personal connection, of sorts, to the case.

Ford glanced over, then shrugged. “I’ve seen him here a few times. I think his friend owns the bar or something.”

“And that must be Rylann,” Brooke said, referring to the woman with long, raven-colored hair having dinner with him. She watched as Rylann shook her head at something Kyle said, and then laughed at whatever he said next.

Hold on. You’re friends with a woman whose fiancé you sent to prison?

“You might want to stop drooling, Brooke,” Ford said. “I’m pretty sure the Twitter Terrorist is already taken.”

She blinked. “What? Oh, no—I was looking at her.”

Ford raised an eyebrow. “Now this is getting intriguing.”

Men. “I wasn’t checking her out, Ford. I know her. Or at least, I know of her. She’s friends with Cade. I was thinking about how he once told me that it’s a weird situation since he’s the one who prosecuted her fiancé.” She smiled, remembering their conversation that night. “I asked if he thought they would invite him to their wedding, and we were laughing about whether they made a card that said, ‘So glad we’ve all gotten past the time I called one of you a terrorist in open court.’” She smiled, and then shrugged at Ford. “You probably had to be there.”

“Another inside joke.”

“Yes.” She felt her smile falter a bit, and exhaled. She forced herself not to dwell on negative thoughts—this was a celebration, after all. “Let’s talk about something else. Like the blonde in the pink shimmery shirt who’s been eying you all evening.”

“Brooke.” Ford looked at her in all seriousness. “Why don’t you call Cade? I get that you were holding back before because of your work situation. But that’s not a problem anymore.”

She nodded, having realized this, too. And a part of her was tempted to do just that.

But.

“I just . . . I don’t know what he’s thinking. When I told him about the job offer from Spectrum, he wasn’t exactly begging me to stay in Chicago.” To the contrary, really. Knock ’em dead in Charlotte, Brooke.

“Well, did you say anything that indicated that you were considering him in your decision?”

Brooke took a moment, thinking through every word of their last conversation. “Okay, no. Fair enough. But that’s just it. I’ve suddenly had this epiphany, this new outlook on what I want in my life, but that’s me. What if I go to him and tell him everything that I’ve been feeling and he doesn’t feel the same way?” Potentially the one thing worse than having Cade tell her she wasn’t a big-picture girl, she’d decided, would be having him tell her that she’d never been in any picture.

“That would suck balls.”

She laughed, then realized Ford wasn’t joking. “Wait, that’s your answer?”

“Yes, because it’s the truth,” he said.

“Well, I don’t want the truth. I want to be pumped up, given a pep talk, the whole you-go-girl, you-can-do-this shebang. I want you to say, ‘That’s just crazy talk, Brooke. Of course Cade wants to be with you. You two are great together. In fact, I bet he’s been moping around for the last two weeks, unshowered and barely able to leave his apartment because he’s so depressed you haven’t called.’ Or something—anything—that gives me hope that I won’t end up crashing and burning if I do this.”

“That’s what I was supposed to say?”

“Yes, that is what you were supposed to say, Ford Dixon,” she said, all worked up now.

“Oh.” He mulled this over. “On the upside, I do think there’s at least a good forty to fifty percent chance that what you said is true. Well, not the part about him not showering and unable to leave his apartment. Guys don’t do that. We avoid issues, we get drunk, sometimes we pick up another chick to forget the old one—” he must’ve seen the look of panic in her face—“not suggesting that’s the situation here, I’m just talking, you know, about the gender in general, and . . . I’m thinking I should probably shut up now.”

Brooke covered her face. “Thank you, Ford. And here I’d been worried before.” She stared down, hands rubbing her temples as she tried really, really hard not to imagine Cade with another woman. Then something slid across the table and into her view.

Ford’s iPhone.

With a photo of a bare-chested Ryan Gosling.

Despite everything, she smiled.

“Sorry,” Ford said with a sheepish grin. “Clearly, we’ve established that I’m not the best at the motivational pep talks. But can I say one more thing?”

“Just, please, try not to freak me out anymore, okay? I’m already far out of my wheelhouse just by considering this whole lay-everything-on-the-line scenario.”

“The only way you’ll know for certain what Cade is thinking is if you ask him.”

Brooke considered this, and then nodded.

Reluctantly, she had to admit that her “best friend with the penis attached” had gotten that part right.

Thirty-three

CADE ASKED THE cabdriver to drop him off a few blocks from his apartment, thinking some fresh air would do him good. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d had a few drinks and wanted to clear his head—especially after his talk with Vaughn.

The main issue he had with Vaughn’s surprisingly non-terrible advice was that it didn’t address the real problem. Brooke moving to Charlotte was not the real problem. Sure, it didn’t make the situation any easier, but lots of couples dealt with job relocations and transfers, they made sacrifices for each other or they had long-distance relationships, and they figured it out.

The real problem was him.

The moment he’d heard from Charlie about Brooke’s job offer, and he’d felt that stab of disappointment, he’d closed himself off emotionally. He’d gone into his hey-it-doesn’t-matter mode, and had put on his nothing-fazes-me grin, and he’d told himself—and, essentially, Brooke, too—that it didn’t matter if she left.

That was what he did. That was what he’d always done. He pushed things away that hurt, and then he moved on. His father? Don’t want to think about the asshole. Football? Yeah, that was great back in the day, but let’s talk about something else. Move on.

He remembered that very first morning with Brooke, watching her sleep in his bed and wondering if he could allow himself to get close to her. And slowly, he’d been doing that, whether he’d realized it at the time or not, but as soon as the other shoe had dropped and he’d felt foolish for thinking they were on the same page, he’d thrown on an easy smile and had walked away.

Typically, that was a good play for him. One that had always worked in the past. Noah’s rejection had hurt, so he took all that anger and negative energy and he’d channeled it, positively, onto the football field. Then when fate had yanked football away from him, he’d gone to law school, and had funneled his ambition and drive into a successful legal career.

And he’d been doing just fine since then. Until everything had upended like the damn Titanic when a sixteen-year-old kid and a sassy lawyer had waltzed into his life. After that, it had suddenly become all Oh, let’s open up and share and Oh, isn’t it cool having a brother and Oh, Brooke, it’s so perfect with you and there’d been voices in his head, and all these weird feelings, and now, for the first time in his life, he was a mess.

Cade took a moment to let that sink in as he turned onto his block.

Huh. Zach had been right.

It really wasn’t that much fun being a mess.

He was in uncharted waters here, and he had a decision to make. He could keep doing his self-protective thing, and let Brooke walk out of his life, and continue on with his string of unfulfilling four-month relationships with women who didn’t challenge him, didn’t make him laugh over a simple text message, and didn’t push him to be better. Or he could go find Brooke—a woman moving halfway across the country, a woman who’d specifically told him, in their very last conversation, that they’d both known from the beginning their relationship wasn’t anything permanent—and lay it all on the line, and hope that he didn’t look like a complete jackass in the process.

Cade waited for the annoying voices in his head to chime in with their opinions on that one.

Nothing.

This time, he was on his own, apparently.

As he opened the gate in front of his apartment building, he noticed someone sitting on the front steps. Whoever it was appeared to be waiting for somebody, and Cade smiled, thinking for a split second that maybe, coincidentally, it would be Brooke and—

Then he saw that it was his brother.

“Hey, Zach,” he said, heading up the front walkway. They didn’t have plans that night, so this was a surprise. “What brings—”

He stopped when he saw that Zach had been crying.

Instantly, Cade knew what was wrong—or at least, the source of whatever was wrong.

Noah.

The asshole had done something. Of course he had. Cade immediately went into protective mode. “What happened?”

Zach swallowed. “I kept thinking that you would come around eventually. I figured that once you got to know me better, you’d want to know more about our dad, too. But I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen.”

Cade ran a hand through his hair and exhaled. He’d always suspected that Zach had been angling for some heartwarming father-son reunion between him and Noah, but he hadn’t realized the kid was this serious about it. “I know you want that, Zach. And I want say that I’ll try, but—”

“He’s dying.”

Cade pulled back, the words dropping like stones in the air. “What?”

“He’s dying, Cade,” Zach said quietly. “My father—your father—is dying.”

Cade stared at him for a long moment. “How?”

“Cancer. Started in his lungs. I guess he used to be a big smoker before I was born. But we were—” Zach cleared his throat—“he was beating the lung cancer. Then an MRI scan came back about six weeks ago that showed a tumor on his brain stem. I knew it was going to be bad.”

It was all coming together now. “Six weeks ago. That’s when you came to see me.” And suddenly, a few things that had been nagging in the back of Cade’s mind made sense. Why Noah wasn’t helping Zach with football. A few odd, offhanded comments Zach had made here and there.

“After they did the biopsy, they told us that it’s some really aggressive kind of tumor. I knew then that I had to find you. I needed to do that for him. And I hoped we would have more time, but . . . they did a follow-up scan and we found out today that the tumor’s already grown.” Zach’s voice trembled. “They say that if we’re lucky, he’ll make it eleven months.”

Eleven months.

Cade felt a pit in his stomach as Zach wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. It killed him to see Zach so upset. Maybe they hadn’t found each other until six weeks ago, but it didn’t matter. This was his brother. He reached out and put his hand on Zach’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Zach.”

Zach pushed Cade’s hand away and stood up, suddenly going on the offensive. “You’re sorry?” He stepped closer to Cade, raising his voice. “Really?”

Cade held his ground. “Of course I am. No matter what happened between us, I’d never wish this on Noah. And I’d certainly never wish this on you.”

“Good. Then I want you to do something for me.” Zach’s jaw was set in determination. “I want you to go see him.”

That was . . . not a good idea. “I understand what you’re doing here, Zach. And it’s an admirable thing. But I say this in all sincerity: I don’t think Noah would want to see me. Especially not right now, with everything he has to deal with.”

“That’s a cop out.”

“Does he even know we’ve been hanging out?” Cade asked.

Zach paused before answering. “No.”

Christ. Before Cade could respond to that, Zach continued.

“I didn’t want to tell him in case you refused to ever see him,” he said defensively. “Look, I get it. You spent your whole childhood waiting for your dad to show up, this big hero you’d built up in your head. And then he let you down. You know why I get that? Because I waited my whole life for someone to show up, too. You. Cade Morgan, football star. I never forgot that day when I was watching the Rose Bowl and my dad told me you were my brother.” His blue eyes snapped with anger. “When I was younger, I fucking idolized you. Whenever I got in trouble and my parents sent me to my room, I used to dream up these scenarios where you showed up and sneaked me out of my room, and we’d go on these crazy adventures together. So things didn’t exactly work out the way I’d hoped either, did they?”