Her eyes lit, green pools of excitement. “You really want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

“The kids. I worked mostly with the youngest ones, those who didn’t realize how little they had and I tried to always sub in schools that were most high need. Sometimes it’d be for months at a time until they could hire permanent teachers. But I loved the kids’ innocence. So many of them came from situations, emotionally anyway, as a family, so much worse than mine, and yet I could relate to that feeling of being unloved… unwanted—”

She pressed her lips closed. Shut down. It happened in an instant, and where she’d arched her back and sat up straight and tall while she talked about what she loved, when it got to how she’d been hurt, her shoulders slumped and she curled in on herself.

And I sat there—having no idea how to fix it, because I’d never felt that or been subjected to it.

“Anyway, yeah… it was the kids.”

At least I could relate to that. “My parents used to do a day camp for kids at their farm.”

“I know.” She smiled slowly, bringing herself out of her thoughts. “Heather used to tell me about it. How you two would be forced to work, but you got out of it because of hockey.”

I barked out a laugh. “That shit. She lies so bad. The poor girl who had to do the work because I wasn’t around.”

“That’s not true?”

“Fuck no.” I was still laughing. The audacity of my sister. “I was up at four in the fucking morning with my dad, cleaning stalls, feeding cows and horses and goats or hogs or whatever animals we were raising for FFA kids that summer. My ass was in the damn tractor before sunrise, moving hay for the cattle to eat before Heather’s ass was ever out of bed. Yeah, she had to play with the kids at camp and teach them how to ride or feed and care for the animals, but I had practice most mornings at six or seven, and my parents always had my ass up before then to help.”

She chuckled and brushed her hands down her jawline before settling them at her sides. She didn’t bother covering herself, and I noticed.

Fuck yeah, I did.

“You know. We may not be all that different. I don’t know if I ever said that to Heather.”

There were a shit ton of ways we were, but she was smart. Thoughtful. “How so?”

“We both had good lives, good upbringings. My grandparents were there when my own parents failed me and made sure even though we had all the money in the world, I used it for the right purpose. They kept me grounded. You were raised with being grounded, didn’t have a lot, but once you earned it, you kept that same grounding.”

There was something in that compliment, something I couldn’t pinpoint, but it sounded like the best fucking compliment I’d ever been given. And that was when it hit me. She’d said I’d earned it. And yeah, I fucking had. But to most people, even fans, they looked at us like we were rich assholes who played games for a living and got rich off them.