After our parents died, I raised my younger brother as my own—but on his 18th birthday, he gave me Mom’s old jewelry box and said, “There’s something she never wanted you to know.”

holding out my travel mug.

I’d become Lucas’s guardian.

“I know, I know.”

I took the coffee and squeezed his shoulder.

At eighteen, he was taller than me now, but his eyes still held that same softness from when he was ten.

“Aunt called,” he added quietly. “She wants to come to the birthday dinner next week.”

My stomach tightened.

“She wants to come to the continue reading …