AllFreeNovel
Share Us
One side of her mouth lifted wryly. “Understatement.”
Phin hesitated. “He was your twin.”
She studied him. Phin was never one for gossip or small talk, so he had to be going somewhere with this. “Yes, he was. It’s hard to believe some of the things I’ve heard about him. I thought I knew him better than anyone else.”
“He was using?” The question was asked gently, but it wasn’t really a question. Seemed like Phin had either heard or had figured things out.
Val nodded. “Seems so. According to his old friend and coworker, anyway.”
“You believe the coworker?”
She shrugged. “I can’t see any reason that he’d lie. I dated him when he and Van were in college. Desmond wouldn’t even take free pens from businesses. He was always honest and still seems to be. He left Cunningham and Spector because they covered up Aaron’s embezzling. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to read people right now.”
He frowned. “Stop. You say you thought you knew your brother better than anyone else did. You may have, but he knew you, too. He knew how to hide things from you.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely,” he said, his voice gone hard.
“Personal experience?”
“Yeah.” He took a big swallow of coffee. “I’m a twin, too.”
Val stared at him. “I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t talk about her. Or any of my family, actually.”
Sadness filled her chest. “I’m sorry. Were they... mean to you?”
He shot her an incredulous look. “Mean to me? I’m six-four and two-thirty. It would be damn hard to be mean to me.”
But abuse wasn’t always delivered with fists. Sometimes it was a parent withdrawing so deeply after the death of a child that they forgot about their surviving children. Sometimes it was a sibling’s betrayal.
Except she wasn’t sure any longer which sibling had done the betraying. Before yesterday she’d have been a hundred percent sure that it was Sylvi. Now she didn’t know, and that bothered her the most.
Because maybe it was me. What if Sylvi hadn’t been the reason for Van’s death? But even if she had been, Sylvi hadn’t meant for it to happen.
Val pushed the uncertainty aside. “Were they mean to you?”
“No. They were the best family any guy could ever hope for.”
“Then why don’t you talk about them?”
Phin looked into his coffee cup for a long moment before finally meeting her eyes. “I was the bad twin.”
She frowned, confused. “The bad twin?”
“My twin sister is a cop up North. Homicide detective. My dad is a cop. Two of my five brothers are cops. One plays the cello with the city’s symphony. Two are teachers, and one of them served in the Peace Corps. And my uncle is a priest.”
“And you were a soldier.”
He grimaced. “Yeah. Still am, sometimes.” He tapped his temple. “Up here.”
“I know.” She knew he had PTSD. Burke had only shared it so that they knew what to do if Phin had an episode. “I heard only a little. No one talks about you behind your back.”
“I appreciate that. I told Burke to tell everyone, by the way. He would have ‘preserved my privacy’ otherwise.”
Val thought about her own background. No one at the office knew what she’d been through except for Molly and Burke. “He’s good about preserving privacy.”
