“I sense a but.”
“I hate how well you know me.” The corner of my mouth quirked up, and Hunter gave me a sad smile.
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” I agreed softly. “I don’t.”
“So what’s the but?”
“I think we’ve all been too hard on Marshall,” I blurted, the sentence surprising Hunter as much as it did me. It wasn’t what I’d intended to say, and it absolutely wasn’t an answer to his question, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
Was this what love did? Made a person annoyingly introspective about all their other relationships? Not that I was comparing Sophie and Daniel to my brothers or my parents, but I certainly compared my parents to each other and my parents to them.
“That’s not where I thought this was going.”
“Off topic, I know.” I walked myself and my chair closer to my desk, propping my elbows on the edge and resting my chin in my hands. “He was the oldest, though. The first. Can you imagine what it was like to come into that huge house and to be so alone?”
Something flashed across Hunter’s face that looked a lot like regret. I knew it because I felt it myself.
“And then we showed up, and he’s always beensoMarshall, you know?”
“I know.”
“I just realized maybe he’s always been trying to soften life for us which, objectively, not his job, but?—”
“The thought is there,” Hunter finished before I could.
“I think you and I had it easiest because we were so close in age, so much alike. He had to have seen the three of us already out of the house by the time Smith showed up. I wonder maybe if Smith is so much like Marshall because of that, but Marshall tried to?—”
“Soften it,” Hunter finished for me again, this time with a grimace. “This can’t be why you’ve been so distant, Finn. Is this what you’ve been thinking about?”
“Literally just thinking about it since you sat down.”
Hunter laughed at me under his breath and scratched an itch behind his ear. I didn’t know how much time my brother had before he needed to go back to work, but it certainly wasn’t enough time to have the conversation the four of us had been avoiding for our entire lives.
“We can table this for Friday. I’m sorry.”
Hunter shook himself out of whatever haze my thoughts had put him into, then he narrowed his eyes on me again. “Was this a way to avoid talking about Sophie?”
I scoffed. “No, this was a way to avoid talking about Daniel.”
My brother’s eyes went comically wide, and I had no choice but to laugh at him.
“Who is Daniel?” he asked.
“Sophie’s fiancé.”
“Fiancé?!”
“Are you okay, Hunt? Do you need to get your hearing checked?”
“You cannot drop that bomb on me when you know I have to leave and go to court,” he protested, already standing and buttoning his suit.
“I’m not the one who scheduled this meeting so early,” I shot back.
Hunter walked around to the other side of my desk, and I stood to meet him at the corner of it. I was still taller than him, slimmer, but since he’d started to date Lincoln, my brother’s confidence had exponentially grown. It was honestly a little bit annoying, watching all of us grow up into Marshall’s footprint whether we liked it or not.
I raised my hand between us, pinky out, and Hunter hooked his around mine with an unimpressed look.