Anna was still smiling. Good.

“Okay, you’re forgiven. I understand the effect a brother can have.” She connected her phone with his car stereo. “Now. Is this your opinion of proper road-trip music?”

A few seconds later, the dulcet tones of Cardi B came rolling out of his speakers. He grinned.

“This is exactly what I was talking about.”

They moved from Cardi B to Rihanna to Missy Elliot to Tupac to Beyoncé to Lizzo. Okay, yes, she knew what she was doing with this road-trip-music business.

Suddenly, after they’d been listening to music and not talking for a while, she turned to him.

“Your brother—is he your older brother?”

Ben nodded.

“He is. Only by three years, but sometimes he acts like it’s by a dozen.” He laughed to himself, picturing Theo, tipsy, with his glasses crooked, dancing his heart out at the last family wedding. “And sometimes he doesn’t.”

Anna smiled at him.

“You two are close?”

He could barely see the smile on her face now in the dim light from other headlights, but he could tell she was asking because she really wanted to know, not just to make conversation.

“Yeah,” he said. “We are. We’re very different, so sometimes that causes friction, and sometimes we irritate the hell out of each other, but in the end, none of that matters.”

He wondered what Theo would think right now if he knew his brother was speeding toward Southern California with a famous actress in the passenger seat of his car. Actually, he could picture exactly the look on Theo’s face. He almost laughed out loud.

You’re on your way where? With who??

He’d have to text him when they stopped for food, just to experience this moment for real.

He still hadn’t told Theo about Dawn. Or Dawn about Theo, for that matter. She’d emailed him back in response to his apology email—she was a first-grade teacher, and also a dance instructor. She’d included a picture of herself as a little kid, with her mom . . . and their dad.

It was definitely their dad in the picture—Ben rarely looked at old pictures of his dad, but he knew it was him because it looked just like Ben. It was uncanny.

The picture could still be fake, though. It could be just some random picture of his dad with some woman and her kid. He kept trying to tell himself that, but in his heart, he knew it wasn’t true.

“What about you and your brother?” he asked Anna, to shake off thoughts of Dawn.

He could hear the smile in her voice.

“We’re also very different, but he’s great. He’s a very buttoned-up professor at Cal, deeply academic, but also very funny. Every so often, some of his students realize who his sister is—Gardiner isn’t my real last name, you know—and they freak out, which cracks me up.”

“Is he also older?” Ben asked.

Her hair tossed back and forth as she shook her head, and she pulled a ponytail holder off her wrist and pulled it back.

“No—I’m two years older, but he’s always seemed like the older one. Except when I’m embarrassing him, which I’ve always loved to do. I still do.” She laughed. “I made him come with me to an awards show a few years ago, and afterward there was a whole series of articles about ‘Anna Gardiner’s hot brother.’ He was mortified. I loved it.”

Oh God, Ben would love to be able to embarrass Theo like that.

“That is absolutely something I’d do to my brother. For years, girls had crushes on him that he was totally oblivious to. Granted, it also took him a long time to realize he’d fallen in love with his girlfriend once it happened. My therapist says we all have blind spots; I guess that’s Theo’s. He’s the smartest person I know, but sometimes I can’t believe how very not smart he can be.”

Anna laughed, but her laugh trailed away at the end. He saw that she was gripping her phone again.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Your brother will call you if he hears anything.”

She took a long breath. And then another one.

“I know,” she said. “He will. I just . . . I don’t want anything to happen to my dad.”

He started to reach for her hand but then stopped himself. Just because she’d wanted him to take her on this impromptu road trip didn’t mean she wanted him to touch her. But before he could move his hand back, she grabbed his and held on tight.

“We’ll get to him,” he said.

She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

“Why were you and your brother going to Tahoe that time? Were you going skiing?”

Ben laughed.

“We’re both too warm-blooded for that. No, it was in the summer, for a family wedding. One of my cousins. We almost got stuck driving with my mom and aunt, which would have been a nightmare. Don’t get me wrong, I love them both very much, but they talk, incessantly, during every car trip longer than fifteen minutes. Neither Theo nor I would have made it. But we couldn’t leave work as early as they wanted to go, so we got a trip to ourselves. We even . . .”

Ben looked over at Anna after he’d finished his story and saw that she’d fallen asleep.

 

* * *

 

—

Anna slowly opened her eyes. It took her a minute to realize where she was. In the car with Ben, on the way to Palm Springs, to see her dad. The motion of the car, the darkness, the cozy warmth, the sense of companionship she felt, all put a lazy smile on her face, despite the reason for the drive. She turned her head just in time to see Ben dancing along to “Oops! . . . I Did It Again”—hand motions and all—and she laughed.

“You’re awake,” he said, showing no embarrassment about his car dancing.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked.

He glanced at the clock.

“About an hour and a half. Good timing—there’s an In-N-Out coming up in about thirty minutes.”

She sat upright and stretched. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Sometimes she did that as a stress reaction—when the world got too much for her, she would hide away and take a nap and let everything disappear. She’d managed to hold her panic about her dad at bay for the first few hours of their drive, but it had finally gotten to her. She rarely felt comfortable enough with other people these days to let herself fall asleep in front of them, though. She was glad she had this time—the nap had helped, at least somewhat.

“I certainly hope you would have known to wake me up for In-N-Out,” she said.