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"A stage kiss. It's a school play."

"Who's playing the prince?"

"I'm working on that." She pulled out her phone and walked to the corner, already dialing.

In a few minutes I was going to walk out under stage lights in front of every parent in the neighborhood. Six years of making sure nobody saw my face, and I'd just said yes to a spotlight. I told myself it didn't matter. Six years was a long time. I was older, thinner, my hair was different. Even if the wrong person saw a photo, they wouldn't know it was me. Maybe.

She came back three minutes later with her whole face lit up.

"My brother. He's coming. He's five minutes away." She clasped her hands together. "He owes me about forty-seven favors and I just called one in."

"Your brother?" The divorced brother who buried himself in work and ignored her texts. "He agreed to this?"

"I guilted him." She squeezed my shoulders. "You're going to be great. He's going to be fine. This is going to work."

She disappeared back into the chaos of costumes and set pieces. I stood in the wings reading the script again, trying to memorize the four lines I had in Act 1 while parents filed into their seats and someone's kid knocked over the aluminum foil turret.

I tried to picture Erin's brother. Based on everything she'd told me, I'd imagined a closed-off, graying man in his forties who'd shake my hand without smiling and get through this play like a task on a checklist.

"Alex! Here you are! Finally!"

I looked up from the script.

He was walking toward us through the backstage crowd, taller than everyone around him. His shoulders filled the space differently than anyone else's, and he moved through the knot of parents and kids completely unbothered by the chaos around him.

Then he turned his head. I saw his face, and I knew him.

I knew that face.

He was older. The jaw was sharper, the shoulders were broader. But it was him. The same man, standing in a school auditorium in Boston, about to play a prince in his sister's charity play.

The stranger from Edinburgh was Erin's brother.

CHAPTER 4

The Princess and the Tower

ALEX

I was three blocks from the school and already regretting agreeing to this when Erin's call came through the speaker.

"Don't hang up."

"Is everything okay?"

"Both of my leads are down with the flu and now I'm standing backstage with twenty-three kids in costumes and no prince to save my new princess from the tower." Her voice was climbing. "If I cancel this play, every kid in this building is going to cry, and it will be your fault."

"How is it my fault?"

"Because you're here, which means God gave me an option, and if you say no, you're the one who let twenty-three children down."

"Erin."

"Come on, Alex. Pleaaaase. Don't you save people from the worst situations every day? Isn't that your job?"

"Not from situations like this."

"You don't need to save me. You need to save my princess. Consider this my 911 call directly to you."