“Okay, fine, but my ego is very fragile about it, so maybe don’t tell me anything bad about it. Maybe don’t say anything at all. Just grunt, and then I’ll put it away real quick.”

“Yeah.”

The high-ceilinged studio had a little half balcony; she retrieved a large canvas from it and then, making a face, turned it around at the bottom of the stairs for him to see.

Matthew looked at it a long time.

“Never mind, say something; silence is much worse,” Jordan told him, and Matthew liked this, too, because it made him feel like she cared about what he thought.

“Does Declan know what it looks like, even a little?” he asked. When she shook her head, he looked at it a bit longer and then he said, “Are you going to marry my brother?”

“Crumbs, man, you go hard. I thought you’d say the foreground was too busy or that I’d gotten his nose wrong.”

Matthew asked, “Why does he treat you like you’re real?”

Jordan looked at him for a long time, as long as he’d looked at the painting, and then she took away the portrait of Declan to the second floor again. When she came back down, she crouched in front of him and said, “Because I am real.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m talking to you, mate! Because I have thoughts and feelings of my own! It doesn’t matter how you got here. You are here.”

Matthew stared at his hands. “What if Ronan made me this way? What if he made me how I am?”

“So what if he did?” She took his hand and jiggled it. “Why do you think Declan’s got his curls? Why do you think Ronan’s an asshole? We all get handed things from our parents. We all have bodies that obey rules that we deal with. We’re not as different as you think.”

Matthew could feel himself retreating from this last sentence as fast as he’d walked away from Old Man Eyebrows.