Billion Dollar Stranger - Stephanie Brother Page 0,56

at reception for him and what I will wear. Meticulous planning has calmed my nerves, but, as I slide the key card into the door of my hotel room, the anxious butterflies return with full force.

Jessie calls when she arrives in reception. She’s come alone this time because it’s only a flying visit and Abbey would be too tired from the traveling to enjoy herself.

I find my cousin in the hotel bar, a shiver running down my spine when I notice how similar it is to the one in Atlanta. Only a short time ago, I was sitting in a different booth, untouched by a man who has so easily managed to possess my body and my heart.

“Nicole,” Jessie calls, waving excitedly. She has a bottle of wine in a silver cooler filled with ice and two large glasses. Her hair is blown out to perfection and her clothes are definitely designer. She looks like an upgrade of my real cousin.

“Jessie. Wow. You look amazing.”

We hug and it feels so good to be embraced by family. She smells expensive but strangely familiar too.

“I got wine,” she says, grinning as we slide into the booth.

“I saw.” She pours me a glass, which is actually about a third of the bottle. I can see I’m going to have to be careful tonight.

“So, when is your meeting?”

“In the morning,” I say. “I think the jet lag’s going to get me badly this time.”

“It must be hard when you’ve got to make a good impression.”

She’s right. Suppressing the yawns is always a challenge after a long flight. “I’ll have to get by with coffee. So how are Abbey and Ryan?”

Jessie smiles broadly at the mention of her little family. “They’re brilliant. Abbey is loving kindergarten and Ryan is getting better at the work-life balance. Everything is good. It’s so weird being able to say that.”

I reach across the table and rest my hand on Jessie’s. “I know, hon. It must be such a relief.”

“You have no idea. Sometimes I look back on the last few years and I can’t really understand how it all happened. I thought I knew where I was in life. Things had gone wrong and I needed to pick up the pieces. I guess I just saw what I was doing as punishment in a way.”

“You didn’t deserve punishment,” I say fiercely. “Nothing that happened was your fault.”

“I know that now, but at the time I didn’t see myself or my situation clearly. My eyes were to the ground.”

“Then Ryan rode in on his white horse.” I imagine the fairy tale that pulled Jessie from her terrible situation, the debt her husband left behind after he died and that she kept secret from everyone in her family.

“I wish it had been as simple as that,” she says, twisting her wedding ring on her finger. “He was broken too. We went through a lot before things started to go right for us.”

“But you knew he was the one?”

Jessie shrugs. “Not at the start. It’s hard to see clearly when you have so much clouding your vision. Ryan wasn’t prepared to be the man that he actually is, not until he found something to bring him back.”

“You?”

My cousin takes a long drink of wine and shakes her head. “Abbey. Well, he didn’t know it was a girl at the time, he just knew that there was a child that was going to come into the world without a father if he didn’t pull himself together. He loved me, but it was our baby that really brought him back from the edge. It was the baby that gave him hope.”

“Wow,” I say, amazed at how much I didn’t know about the background to Jessie’s relationship. We make so many assumptions about other people’s lives, seeing our own as so much more complicated in comparison.

“The older I get, the more I see that life isn’t perfect for anyone. It’s gritty and dirty and damaged and broken, but we find our way and hopefully find another person who accepts all the difficult things that have shaped us and help us to find a path through it all.”

“Is that what Ryan did?”

“That’s what we did for each other.”

On the other side of the bar, a couple are kissing passionately in another booth. I watch as they touch, seemingly without a care. Seeing people so into each other has always made me feel like an outsider. When you haven’t met the person who lights you up that