Home For The Holidays - Jordan Silver Page 0,5

little handball I’d left there earlier. I do some of my best thinking and plotting when I lay like this, tossing a ball in the air. This time though, I was reminiscing about the last year or so and the changes in my life that my family were not yet privy to but will be before the holidays are over.

Where did we leave off? Oh yes, the fateful kiss that was used to end my brother’s marriage. I didn’t bother telling my sister in law what I suspected at the time that her friend had indeed set her up. The truth is, I didn’t have enough evidence and needed more. Had Deidre not still been in love with Tom that part, I might’ve been able to gloss over, but because she still hopelessly believed there was a way for them to work things out, I knew I had to start there at least.

It was painstaking work finding this guy since all Deidre had given me was a first name, and since the guy was not on her friends' list, I couldn’t find him that way. I found a couple of guys with his name on Tessa’s friends’ list, but it turned out that none of them was the one. It would’ve helped if I got my hand on that picture, but since only Tom and whoever had sent it to him were in possession of it, that was a dead end.

In the meantime, I picked apart every aspect of Tessa’s life from as far back as her book of faces history would allow me to snoop. Three months later, when I returned home again on break, I had to swallow my anger and pretend to get close to my brother so that I could have access to his phone.

That had been a rough time because I’d had to hurt Deidre, who thought I was siding with my brother and the walking incubus because of all the time I spent with them at their new place, and of course, I couldn’t tell her the truth. Once I got into my brother’s phone after a night of drinking when I’d talked him and Tessa into a drinking game and then proclaimed the hell dad would rain down on his head if I went home in that condition, and they had to let me stay on the couch.

I should rephrase that and say the two of them played a drinking game. My bottle of Vodka was actually water. I know how much my brother hates the taste of vodka, so his poison of choice had been rum, and of course, the airheaded halfwit had to pretend that she too only enjoys the taste of rum. Meanwhile, a look back at her high school days shows that she’d drink anything she didn’t have to pay for; leech.

After the two of them had dragged themselves off to the boudoir with her giving me looks like she’d won some prize at the state fair, I’d given them a few minutes to settle into sleep before tiptoeing my way into their bedroom. Thank all the saints that my brother was too inebriated to get up to frisky time with her, or I would’ve lost my dinner.

I had my excuses at the ready just in case he woke up while I was in there, but neither of them so much as moved when I walked in. I stood next to the bed for a few seconds more than necessary, wondering how well my alibi would stand up if I said I slept through the whole thing. The thought of my idiot brother having to answer the question of how his hag of a slut girlfriend lost her head while she was right next to him in bed made me walk away.

It was easy enough after a few tries to break into his phone and go hunting for what I needed. I emailed the information to myself along with the messages Tessa had sent him that night and the days after when she was sinking her teeth into him. That situation right there had made me look at the male of the species in a whole new light.

Now, being beautiful and brainy was no deterrent to the hormonal teenage males I went to school with, but dad’s Glock was. The man chaperoned my prom, and my date held me about two miles away from him for every dance. I remember the conversation I had with dad that night when