“She did. Does that make you feel better about how you behaved?” Olivia asked matter-of-factly.

Dammit. He was starting to understand some of the offhand comments the other guys had made about Olivia and their relationships. She was almost too on point with her observations. Thankfully she couldn’t actually see him; he was pretty sure he’d be squirming with discomfort if she could.

He sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t have insisted on being her date.”

“Don’t say that,” Lexie argued immediately. “You’d have been moping and angry all weekend if she was there with Brian.”

“All of this was bound to come up eventually anyway,” Patrick chimed in. “Better sooner than later, especially if you can’t work through it.”

“Do you want to work through it?” Lexie asked.

Jake rubbed his hand over his face.

He didn’t like one of the sides of Sharon that he’d seen today. Andrew had said she needed looking after because she was too independent to ask for help. Was there something he could have done to make today easier for her?

Nothing immediately came to mind. Because he didn’t know her family or how to deal with them. Olivia was right that he shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about how she dealt with them.

Yeah, he’d sympathized with her parents, because that was exactly how Sharon had treated him for months, but maybe her parents did deserve it. He didn’t know what they had done to make her go immediately on the offensive with them.

While he might empathize with her parents, it was because she’d done the same thing to him, not because it was the same situation. There had been no real reason for her not to give him a chance. For all he knew, her parents had run out of chances.

He’d been worried that family wasn’t important to Sharon, but it was clear after tonight that it was. Maybe not every member equally, but she’d been there for her cousins. Jake sighed.

“Yes, I want to work through it.” As long as she didn’t continue to paint him with the same brush she used for her parents. That wasn’t fair to him. “Luke’s been pretty quiet. What does he think about all this?”

He asked the question more to lighten his mood than anything.

“You got this, man.”

Jake couldn’t help but chuckle. “Thanks, boss.”

Although he considered knocking on Sharon’s door after he got off the phone, he decided against it. A night for both of them to cool down wasn’t going to do either of them any harm and might even do them some good.