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“I’ll try to text when I get home,” she said.
She’d set an alarm on her phone when she hung up to do it by nine. She was positive she’d be home by then.
After finishing her call with Quinn, she got a text from Braylon that he was five minutes out.
She put her phone in the front pocket of her lightweight jacket along with her credit card and some cash. She’d seen that no purses were allowed on the crown of the Statue and Lilian wanted to climb all those stairs to get to the top and not worry about locking her purse up in some public locker she’d have to rent.
She didn’t have a lot in life, but what she had, she took care of.
She locked her apartment, put her key in the same zippered pocket as her phone and credit card and walked down the stairs to wait for Braylon on the stoop.
He arrived in a taxi this time. He got out and opened the door for her again.
“You’ve got some manners,” she said. “Your mother has to be proud.”
“Drilled into our heads by our father more than our mother,” he said.
He hadn’t said how his father died, but since he’d said it wasn’t in the country she assumed it might be during some kind of war. She imagined he’d talk about it if he wanted to. If she asked too many personal questions about his life as a child, he’d do the same.
“It’s a nice trait to see in a man,” she said.
She wasn’t sure if it was because Braylon was nine years older than her and the men she normally dated were younger or if it was the way he was raised.
Probably a combination of both.
They drove to the ferry. “I got our tickets last night. Since you’re without your purse, I’m going to assume you checked out their website?”
“I did,” she said. “I like to be prepared.”
“Good,” he said. “I thought after we were done we could get some lunch and then see what the rest of the day brought us.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said.
It was as busy as she expected, but she had a blast walking up the one hundred and sixty-two steps to the top. She didn’t need to know the number by reading it because there was a kid in their group who counted every step he took.
“Is it horrible that at one point I wanted to shout out another number?”
Her jaw dropped over the adorable grin on his face. “Yes, it is.”
“If it were one of my siblings doing that, I totally would.”
“I never was close enough to my siblings to do that,” she said.
“I’m sorry for that. Eight kids in a three bedroom house, we had no choice but to be close.”
“Yikes,” she said. “How many bathrooms?”
“One and a half,” he said. “My mother has a huge house now.”
“That West bought?” she asked.
“He had it built for her. There are a few wings in it so that any of the kids back then had their own space. We knew what it was like not to have it. West, Foster and I shared. My mother, Laken and Talia had a room. Then Elias, Rowan and Nelson had a room.”
“That had to be tight,” she said.
“You have no idea,” he said, “but we got through just fine.”
“Which one of your siblings would have been counting, if any?”
