Fortunate Son (The Forever Marked #1) - Jay Crownover Page 0,3

my little sister with everything in me. We were extraordinarily close and rarely kept secrets from each other. We were close enough in age that it had often been the two of us against the world, no matter what. She was my favorite person and my most trusted confidant. But she was also my ex’s best friend. They were only a few months apart in age, and where one went, the other often followed. When I first started showing interest in Aston Wheeler, my sister was totally against the idea of us being anything more than good friends. She told me she never wanted to be caught between the two of us. She never wanted to have to pick a side or have to keep something from either one of us. I waved the concerns off because I was sure Aston and I were meant to be. I’d grown up surrounded by true love and examples of young love maturing into happy, healthy, long-lasting marriages. I thought staying with my first love through thick and thin might be the only way I might manage to take after my parents.

I didn’t want to think that it was possible that Daire knew what would happen to my relationship before I did. Or that she kept something so huge from me. But any way I looked at it, she had to have known things were going south before I did.

“I’m going for a drive. Tell Mom and Dad not to worry. I’ll be fine.” I would be. Eventually.

My sister sighed on the other end of the line, and I could hear her pacing around. She was the type who was constantly in motion. She never sat still, and her mind was always going a mile a minute. I knew if I didn’t convince her I was okay, she would venture out aimlessly into the night trying to track me down, even though she had no idea where I was or how long I’d been in my truck.

“You’ve been driving for the last four hours? Are you even in Colorado anymore?” Daire’s voice rose sharply.

I looked at the clock on the dashboard and blinked when I realized how much time had passed. I was still in Colorado, but just barely. I was almost at the southern border. I didn’t have a plan when I climbed in my truck and started to drive. Subconsciously, I started heading toward the one person no one would ever suspect me of turning to when I was hurting.

“Give me some time, Daire.” I wanted to close my eyes and make the world disappear until I could fully deal with the empty ache in the center of my chest. Since I was driving, that wasn’t an option, so all I could do was shake my head and blink my eyes, which alternately felt like they were wet with hot tears and yet still dry as the desert. “I have to get my head on right before I try to talk to anyone, especially you, about what went down today.”

She made a distressed sound, and I could clearly imagine her putting her brightly painted nails to her mouth. She always wore a bunch of rings and bracelets that clinked and banged together, making so much noise. My little sister was anything but subtle, and you could always hear her coming. She knew how to make an entrance, but she also knew when it was time to back down and fade into the background. She knew all my buttons and when to push them. I would always answer her when she called me, but I had limits to how much I would let her poke and prod at me when I was hurting.

“I didn’t know, Ry. I honestly had no idea Aston was going to break up with you. She’s been weird lately, but I thought it was because we were graduating, or maybe because Royce left last year and moved to New York. You know how close she was to her brother. She never mentioned anything about being unhappy with you to me. I promise I would’ve told you.” I could hear that she was starting to cry and it made me feel like shit.

I should’ve listened to her at the start when she said dating my buddy Royce’s younger half-sister was a terrible idea. We were all too close, our families too connected for it to end any other way than tragically. Aston had taken it hard when he decided