“How do you remember all their names?” I’m only half-joking. A family that big—I can’t really imagine.

He smiles over at me. “You don’t forget your siblings’ names. No matter how many of them there are.”

“Yeah, of course.” I add an awkward laugh, but then I lower my eyes and press my hands into my thighs, rubbing at the aching that’s mostly dissipated now. When we got here, Reid insisted that I stretch my legs out in front of me along the bench’s slats, and then—a stroke of magic—he’d produced a small blister pack of (not stale) ibuprofen from his jacket pocket. My first of the twenty questions had thus almost been Will you marry me? but instead I’d settled for asking whether he always has pocket-sized pain relief.

“The occasional tension headache,” he’d said as he settled his tall, lean form right up against the bench’s other side, leaving me most of the space. Something had closed off in his face when he’d answered, an echo of that T-E-N-S-E, so I’d stayed on the sibling stuff he’d introduced with the mention of his sister.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?” Reid asks, and I guess it’s only fair, but I really preferred when this game of twenty questions was focused on him.

“Uh, no.” It comes out more sharply than I intend. But not having siblings—it’s a sore spot in my family history, nearly as sore as my dad having a decade-long affair with Jennifer, and my mom knowing about it the whole time.

“I always wondered what it’d be like, though,” I add, trying to soften the edge.

“Crowded,” he says flatly. Then he looks over at me, his mouth curving upward, and I think it’s his own way of softening that edge.

“Do you miss them? Living here, I mean?”

“Yes,” he says immediately. He looks back at the signs. “But it’s a relief, sometimes. To live alone.”

“I’ve never lived alone,” I admit, and in my surprise at having said it, I clutch tighter at the muscles of my thighs, kneading up and down. When I look up, I catch Reid watching the movement, and something in my middle warms pleasantly.

But he seems to catch himself, and he raises his eyes, his blue gaze tangling with mine briefly. That warmth spreads out, seems to exist in the space between us.

He clears his throat. “Never?”

I shake my head. “I left my parents’ house to come here. And I’ve lived with Sibby”—I knead more aggressively—“ever since.”

“Sibby is your . . . ?”

I take a deep breath, struck by how quickly the conversation has turned. It’s strange, how sitting here in the quiet with Reid feels similar to walking out there in the loud beside him. A different kind of game, leading to a different kind of unblocking.