I loved the pre-chorus in this song. Glancing back at Sylvia, I smiled at her light tinkering on the piano while I sang. Then I raised my voice, and Luiz kicked it up for the chorus.

“Hey, big brother.” Nicky spoke into the mic during an instrumental part I wasn’t playing in.

“Aye, bambino.”

He flashed me a smirk and tossed me something—shit, my harmonica.

“Show ’em how it’s done,” he said, trapping his strings under a finger and distorting the sound. Good thing I was great at improvising. I threw myself into the last chorus while he slapped on the muted strings, and then I stopped providing rhythm and lifted my harmonica to the mic.

Maria and Matt had no problems lifting the choir and singing louder, and it gave me a moment to play the harmonica next to Nicky’s banjo.

We only had a few songs left, and I understood what my brother was doing. We were having the time of our life, and some things, we didn’t want to end.

“Let the knife do the work, sweetheart. No need to push the blade through the meat.”

Right. I was being impatient because I was starving. It was also mildly unnerving to stand on the other side of the kitchen island, across from him, and hear his knife make those incessant little chops at a pace not even a woodpecker could match. In this alternate universe, he’d decided to put me in charge of the meat while he made the salad.

So I guessed we were having salad for dinner.

I bobbed my head to the beat of the music and carefully sliced through the meat, wondering why he didn’t just buy the meat as steaks ready to throw on the grill.

“I feared you’d grown up with Conway Twitty or something like that,” I said. Instead, he’d grown up listening to Queen—which was playing on the stereo right now—Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Deep Purple.

August laughed and gathered the chopped onions into a bowl. “You have some interestin’ thoughts on Southerners.”

“The curse of never having traveled much.” I added the steaks to a plate. “My world is made up of stereotypes. Hell, I grew up around stereotypes.”

He tilted his head, curious. “A grandmother and a father raising two homosexual brothers doesn’t sound like the most stereotypical upbringin’.”