by Nicole Deese
She slid the documents toward me and stood, planting her cheetah heels deep into the carpet fibers. “So what are you taking me to see first? I’ve been dying to have a look around this place.”
I was absolutely certain that was true. Molly seemed the type of person who would open every private drawer and cabinet in a guest bathroom and then inform the host of an expiring prescription. She was anything but subtle.
“First I’d like to drop this signed paperwork off in my office.”
“Perfect.” She hesitated in the open doorway, then looked both ways as if the hallway were a busy interstate.
“Take a left,” I instructed.
She laughed. And something about the lightness of it caused me to do the same.
13
Molly
I was on such a high when I left The Bridge that instead of heading home, I drove to the only other place I possessed a key to: my brother’s house. Miles lived in a could-be-quite-charming-if-he-tried ranch home nestled on the Idaho side of the Washington State border. As a unique bonus, the house had an attached-yet-separate upstairs apartment he used like an investment property to support his multiple trips abroad. After all, paying off seminary and a mortgage while living on a pastor’s salary hadn’t left a ton of wiggle room in his budget. His current upstairs renter was a college student who had asked to stay through the summer to be closer to his girlfriend—a concept that was completely lost on my brother, seeing as he hadn’t had a date in, well . . . I couldn’t even remember how long.
But I rarely complained about his stark lack of decor or how a fresh coat of paint—or five—would make a huge difference to the entire mood of his diamond-in-the-rough home, because the only thing that really mattered to me about his house was where it was located. He might love to travel the world and be a superhero a few months out of the year, but Miles always came back. His home was here, near mine. Which was the exact reason I had declined Ethan’s many invitations to move to Seattle near him. I just couldn’t.
No matter how frustrating my differences with Miles were at times, I knew I couldn’t ever leave him . . . the same way Miles knew he couldn’t ever leave me. He was my twin, but in many ways, he was the only family I really had.
I banged on his door, giving him the option to invite me inside before I reminded him of the key I refused to return. As soon as he twisted the deadbolt, a rush of anticipation had me lifting the grocery bag in the air with a smile.
“Hi, I brought snacks!” Likely Miles’s favorite phrase ever spoken.
He gestured to the phone pressed to his ear and waved me inside. I gave him a thumbs-up and headed to his sparse, but mostly clean, kitchen. I’d learned over the years that if I planned to make a meal at Miles’s house, I needed to provide more than just the basic ingredients for the recipe itself—which meant all necessary spices, sauces, and cooking utensils. Reason enough to eat at my place.
I set out the Raisinets. Whose favorite junk food included raisins? My brother’s, naturally. Then I carefully opened a bag of his coveted Flamin’ Hot Crunchy Cheetos while listening for any clue to whom he might be talking to in such hushed tones. Hopefully not our parents. It was no secret they called him five times more often than they called me; then again, they did have five times more in common with him.
“. . . yes, okay. Sure, I’ll be there. You too. Thanks, Tom.”
Ah, so not Mom and Dad, then. I was fairly certain Tom was one of the guys who worked at the church with him. Or maybe I was thinking of Jim? Or Bob? Whatever the case, there seemed to be a lot of men with three-letter names on staff at Salt and Light Community Church.
“Hey, so what’s all this about? You celebrating something?” He reached for the chocolate-covered raisins, tore the end of the box like a savage, and then seemed to reconsider his guess. “Wait. This isn’t one of your weird TV show premiere nights, is it? I’m not really in the mood to watch some self-proclaimed organizer guru tell a bunch of hoarders to find joy in their sock drawers tonight, Molly,” Miles said in an Eeyore tone.
“First of all, that’s not even close to what she says, but no. That’s not why I came over.” I chose the high road instead of chastising him for attacking one of my favorite guilty pleasures. “Second, why are you in such a bad mood? What was that phone call all about?”
“I’m not. And nothing.”
“Um, you are. And it was obviously something.” I swiped the box of candy from his grasp. “You don’t get to eat my snacks until you tell me.”
He gave me an are-you-kidding-me-right-now glare, but Miles couldn’t stay angry for longer than about six seconds. A tried-and-true fact I’d proven over and over again.
He shook his head, sighed. “It will all be fine. There’s just some turnover happening at work.”
“Turnover? How so?” Several alarm bells rang in my head at once. Turnover in a place of ministry was rarely positive. “Will it affect you? Your job?”
“Not at this point.” He shook his head and snatched the box right back out of my hand. “But it doesn’t help anything to borrow worry even if it does.”
“Don’t borrow worry.” A phrase our parents often said regarding, well, pretty much everything in life.
Miles swiped the Cheetos off the counter before slumping his lanky frame onto the sofa. He twisted to look at me in the kitchen. One of those long, assessing, brotherly looks. “You’re happy.”
I nearly burst at his astute pronouncement. “I am.”
His keen gaze continued to take my measure. “Did you hit a million followers on your Instagram?”
“Since last week? No, Miles.” I rolled my eyes, reaching into the grocery bag for my sugary treasure.
“Secure a cover shoot for Vogue?”
I laughed. “Try again.”
“Get an audition for a TV show?”
A guilt-ridden jolt zapped at my conscience. I still hadn’t told him about the opportunity Ethan had offered me with the Netflix executives, but I would in time. Just not yet. Once things were a bit more secure and I had all the experience the producers needed from me, then I would tell him.
“I’m still holding out hope for that one.” I riffled through his utensil drawer until I found a spoon.
“Then what? What’s the reason for all this?”
I weaved my way from the kitchen to his living room and plopped down on the ugliest chair in the universe to indulge in my treat of choice—a pint of chunky butter pecan ice cream. “I taught a class tonight. And it felt good.” I dug into the pint, fighting my way through the boring vanilla parts to the rich caramelly tunnels.
He looked utterly confused. “What class? You mean, online?”
“No, Miles. At The Bridge. Keep up.”
“How exactly am I supposed to keep up when you haven’t mentioned a thing about that place since you went in for your interview?”
I shrugged, unwilling to tell him the back-and-forth drama of it all. “It took a while for everything to be official—you know how it is, with background checks and such. Anyway,” I said, pausing to consume an unladylike bite, “I start Friday as a mentor. I’ll have six girls in my group during their summer program.”
“Wow, really? Good for you, Molls.”
Not gonna lie, it had been a long time since Miles had said something like that to me with such sincerity. “Thanks. I’m starting to see why you do this for a living.”
“Do what?”
“Look for people to help. It has an addicting quality to it.”
He eyed me as I kicked off my leopard heels and brought my knees up. I had a sudden urge to dish out all the rest—walk Miles through everything I knew about the residents, the program, Glo, and the director, who had to be one of the most difficult people to read on the planet. Maybe Silas Whittaker wasn’t actually a director for a transitional youth home at all. Maybe he was CIA or FBI or some other acronym that came with masking your emotions and talking like a nineteenth-century duke.
I backed out of that
dead-end tunnel and instead steered my mind to something—or someone—a bit easier to figure out. “So there’s this girl who lives there—Wren. She’s super shy and quiet and doesn’t smile very often. But she’s also really sweet. I just wish I could scoop her up in my pocket and take her home with me. I’d do a room makeover for her in my house and give her unrestricted access to my closet and my pantry and my best bath bombs.”
I could almost imagine it—the delight all those gifts would bring to someone who’d had so little good given to them in life. And to be the one to give it to her! That feeling would be nothing short of elation. Is that how Silas felt every time he approved a new resident’s application into the program, too?
Miles stopped popping chocolate-covered raisins into his mouth and stared at me. “You do realize that kidnapping the residents isn’t a standard mentoring practice.”
I met his gaze. “I’m not actually being serious, Miles.” Though, technically, it wouldn’t be a proper kidnapping seeing as Wren was a legal adult. But that wasn’t the point. “Haven’t you ever had that feeling when you first meet someone and everything just clicks? It’s almost like you were supposed to know them. Like knowing them is part of some bigger, more purposeful plan? Well, that’s how I feel about Wren.”
“I do know that feeling.”
My eyes met his, and I knew his next words even before he spoke them.
“And it’s usually an indication that God has something to do with it.”
“That’s one possibility, sure.” But I didn’t like pinning things on God that I wasn’t completely certain about. And truth be told, I wasn’t certain about a lot. Not the way Miles was, anyway. And certainly not the way our parents had always been. I believed in God, and I believed in the stories I’d grown up reading and hearing about from the Bible. But my belief in God hadn’t been the issue. It was the other way around. “I’m just happy our paths crossed the way they did.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she felt the same, but it can be tricky,” he said slowly, as if sorting through a bucket of approved statements in search of the right one. “To find the right balance.”
“What balance?” I dug into the ice cream carton for another bite.
“Of helping without overstepping. It’s difficult to see real needs and not want to rush the process to appease our own desire for restoration.”
“Miles, come on. I already said I was joking about stealing her away. I’m not trying to rush any kind of process.”
He shrugged and reached into the chip bag for another handful. “I’m just saying, in my experience, there’s always a bigger picture to take in than what you can see at first glance.”
“Well, while that may be true, I will say that Fir Crest Manor has more security cameras and checkpoints than the airport, so I can assure you there won’t be much missed by any of the staff.” Hmm . . . I wondered if my new mentor position would classify as staff.
I swung my legs over the side of the hideous chair Miles refused to replace. It was corduroy. Bark-brown corduroy, to be exact. But I’d given up on Miles caring a lick about his poor taste in home decor. I’d once offered to fund a furniture renovation for him myself, but he simply told me to redirect the budget to something that mattered more than where he ate takeout. Unless it cost less than ten dollars or could be consumed in a single sitting, Miles wasn’t the best at receiving gifts. “Have you ever seen it? Fir Crest Manor? Silas gave me a full tour tonight.”
“No, we’ve only met at restaurants.”
Absently, I wondered what kind of food Silas might enjoy. Perhaps something sophisticated that required three different types of forks? “It’s incredible, the house. It reminds me of the mansions I used to tour with Mimi when I was a teen. It’s over twelve thousand square feet and has nine rooms, which they’ve mostly converted into classrooms and community areas, and then of course it has large open spaces, too. Oh, and it even has a theater room with all the wiring installed . . . just no screens or seats yet.”
“They have a no-screen theater room?”
I laughed. “Yeah. Actually, some of the rooms are still in the visionary stage. There’s not a lot of furniture to speak of, either. But the residents don’t sleep in the main house. They actually have separate units for the guys and girls on either side of the manor. I think that’s where the bulk of their cash went after they purchased the property.”
“They didn’t purchase it. It was awarded to them—to Silas’s organization, actually.”
I sat up straighter, eager to hear more of whatever intel my brother knew. How was it I was with Silas all evening and that never came up? “What do you mean by awarded?”
“I’m not sure of all the details. I just know that five or six years ago, while Silas was working with a group home in Spokane, an incredibly wealthy man passed away and left that whole estate to a trustee board. They interviewed hundreds of people from all over the country, because there were some pretty specific instructions on what the house could or could not be used for, and Silas was ready. He’d already been working on his nonprofit plan for The Bridge for years, and, well . . .” Miles shrugged. “From what I can recall, his proposal was approved unanimously. I met him shortly after that during a community function.”
“Wow, that’s incredible.”
Miles chuckled. “I’m sure I made it sound much simpler than it actually was. I do know it took him a while to get all the proper licensing and through all the red tape.”
I leaned back in my chair, wishing I could hear the story from Silas’s mouth and subsequently wondering how he’d tell it. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine him bragging on his achievements.
“I’m glad you decided to volunteer out there this summer, Molly,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen you this happy since you reached one hundred thousand followers.”
I crinkled my nose. “That was years ago.”
“Just an observation.”
“For the record, I’m happy often. I love my life.”
He simply nodded, doing his whole quiet reflective thing that drove me bonkers. “And Ethan’s good with you spending so much time away from your duties?”
“My duties, as you call them, are managed on a scheduled timeline. Val keeps me organized and on track.”
Miles chuckled. “Ah yes, good ol’ Video Val.”
“Stop calling her that. She’s a real person.”
“How would you know? You’ve never seen her in real life. She could be a really expensive hologram, or part of an AI militia. I just watched a docuseries on that.”
“You and your docuseries.” I rolled my eyes. “She’s not a hologram or any kind of artificial intelligence. She’s a single mom and a brilliant editor and a great friend. See? She’s three in one. Like the trinity of virtual assistants.”
“Your jokes prove you’ve been out of touch with humanity for too long.”
“Anyway,” I said, dragging the word out, “to answer your question, Ethan is thrilled I’m volunteering.”
Miles did nothing to mask his disbelief. “What’s in it for him?”
“A happier girlfriend, obviously.” I flashed a smile at him, and Miles shook his head once but said nothing more on the subject. And neither did I.
We sat with our own munching sounds for the next few minutes until Miles finally picked up the remote and tossed it at me. “Fine, we can watch your organizer lady if you really want to.”
“Ha! I knew you secretly liked that show.”
“Nope. But anything’s better than hearing you scrape the bottom of that ice cream carton.”
I threw my wet spoon at his chest.
14
Molly
Ethan
Good news. The paperwork for The Fit Glam Kit is set for you to sign.
Molly
Did you figure out what they want me to do at the shoot? To wear?
Ethan
Yes, they sent me the fine print details of everything that’s in the box. It’s their
five-year anniversary box—all specialty summer must-haves. Perfect for you. Oh, and a bonus creation from Sophia Richards herself. She’s excited for you to reveal it.
Molly
Bonus creation?
Ethan
She’s a big fan of your work. Did you see she shared your post about date night looks? You’re up at least 5K followers.
Molly
Wow. That’s super nice of her!
Ethan
I only find you the best.
Molly