“Eh! Excuse me?” When he looked at Nya she was leaning away from him but fixing him with an incredulous stare. “This is the brother you told me you love so much, and that’s how you talk to him?”

For the briefest instant he wanted to tell her she had no clue what she was on about, could never know because she’d never put all her energy into looking after someone and had it thrown in her face. He wouldn’t say that to her, though, no matter how angry he was. First, because from even the little bit he knew of her relationship with her father, that would have been incorrect, and second, she was trying to help—and she was right.

“I’m sorry, Lukas,” he said, struggling to sound normal even though he felt like he’d just been pushed off the esplanade surrounding the Old City. “I was just surprised. This is very unlike you.”

Lukas stood and glared at him. “Unlike me? You don’t even know me!” he shouted, then looked at Linus. “Neither of you do!”

Johan didn’t know what to say in the ringing silence that followed. It was as if he was watching a film and could only sit there as the scene played out.

He remembered helping his mother change Lukas’s diaper. He remembered giving him piggyback rides. He remembered teaching him to ride a bike, and showing him how to make crepes because their mother hadn’t been around to do it. He remembered sneaking into Lukas’s room in the middle of the night, on too many nights, overcome with the need to make sure the boy was still breathing. But maybe his brother was right. Maybe Johan didn’t know anything.

“I guess I don’t,” he mumbled.

Lukas marched over to Nya and bowed over her hand again, the picture of politeness. “It was a pleasure to meet you. You seem like a good person, so you should know that Johan lies all the time and doesn’t care about anything but appearances. Think about that before marrying him.”

He glared at Johan once more for good measure.

He left.

“Welcome to the family,” Linus said, raising his teacup in Nya’s direction before downing the liquid and rising to go track down his son.

Johan sat still, not wanting to look at Nya, or to see the judgment in her eyes. Not wanting her to see the pain in his. He’d become so good at hiding his emotions, burying them under shirtless selfies and snarky remarks—and, yes, lies—that until recently he’d forgotten just how deeply they could affect him. She could say he was nice all she wanted, but if she knew how weak he was, how oversensitive, she’d leave him, too.

She is going to leave. This isn’t real.

He heard her sigh beside him, and then he felt her fingers sift through his hair, her nails gently grazing his scalp.

“Phokojoe, you seem to have forgotten how to lure people to your lair,” she whispered, teasing.

“No kidding.” He inhaled, leaned his head toward her hand and accepted her comfort, though he didn’t deserve it. “I didn’t handle that well at all. I wasn’t prepared.”

“I don’t see why you had to be prepared,” she said carefully. “Your brother just showed you something about himself. I think he was probably frightened of how you would react. And you showed him he was right to be frightened.”

“Fuck,” Johan muttered, guilt hunching his back. He should know better. He was supposed to know what people wanted.

“Sometimes children go through things, and it can be hard for the people who care for them to go along with them. But please . . .”

“What?” he asked, glancing at her.

Her expression was pensive and she worried her bottom lip with her teeth.

“Remember that he is your brother, but he’s also his own person. You should not try to bend him to your idea of who he should be.”

Johan recalled what she had said to her grandmother in the gazebo.

“Is that what your father did to you?” he asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Whenever I tried to express myself in any way he would tell me ‘You don’t want to do that. A good girl wouldn’t want that.’ And then I would get ill, or he would, and that would solve that problem of my wanting.”

Her hand stopped moving in his hair and Johan turned his head toward her, pressing a kiss against her wrist. She was staring off into the distance, but she smiled faintly at the pressure of his mouth.

“My offer still stands,” he said. “If you want to talk or—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, confidant,” she said.

“What do you want?” he asked. A sudden desperate desire to ease her burden, to free her from the sadness that her memories had opened up for her, seized him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s a question I was never allowed to answer and now when people ask, I come up blank.”

She sounded so lost—a woman who’d come to the end of the breadcrumb trail and didn’t know where to go next. The needy, selfish part of Johan thought it wouldn’t hurt to guide her toward him in the meantime. “Will a kiss do until you figure it out?”

That coaxed a smile from her, and chipped away at some of the pain from the argument with Lukas.

“Yes. I would like that. Thank you.”

Politeness was suddenly so damn sexy. His gaze traced her profile and the curve of her sweet mouth as something twisted hard in his chest. It was painful, what he felt just looking at her.