Page 101 of Shine For Me

“When you say ‘this shit’—”

“Jimmy. Dad. You and me. The whole fucking mess that is the Cain family.”

I sip my whiskey. “I think it’s smart how you’re keeping your expectations low.”

That gets a smile out of him—a genuine smile, not the sardonic lip tilt the cameras love.

“How was mom doing?” he asks. “Before everything went to hell.”

“Good.” I stretch my feet out to rest on the coffee table. “She’s happy up there. She has friends. She loves that cottage. I think it’s a good life for her.” I sigh. “Which means you and I made the right choice.”

“It shouldn’t have been a choice,” he says, his voice dark. “That was my fault, too.”

“No, Grey. We both decided—”

“We both decided to stay with Dad because we knew Mom needed to get out of LA,” he says. “But we could have gone with her, June. We could have told the judge we wanted to leave LA with her. The only reason we didn’t is because I wanted to do my stupid TV show. And you didn’t want to leave me.”

I chew my lip. Wenevertalk about this. That awful decision no child should ever have to make.

We were too young to really understand the ramifications when the judge told us he would take our choice into consideration. But Grey heard Dad and Grandpa talking about what shared custody would look like—how they would fight to have the judge force Mom to stay close by to “lessen the strain” of traveling back and forth on me and Grey.

Like either of them ever cared about that. It was all about revenge, plain and simple. Mom stood up to them and they were going to make her life hell for it. And Jimmy Cain would be damned if he let his grandchildren—especially Grey, who was already a child star at that point—outside of his sphere of influence.

We were little kids who didn’t understand the world we’d been forced into by our parents’ divorce. In our minds, asking to live with Mom would have meant shared custody—forcing her to stay in LA—or the two of us moving away with her, putting an end to Grey’s career.

“Be honest, June.” There’s an edge to Grey’s voice. “If it wasn’t for me, you would have asked to move upstate with Mom.”

“That’s stupid,” I argue. “If it wasn’t for you, I probably would have been a twelve-year-old with an ulcer, because there wouldn’t have been someone there to distract me from their fighting. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have slept that entire year, because there’d be no one to sneak into my room every time I had a nightmare.”

I shake my head, wiping at my eyes. “Don’t ask me to imagine a world without you like that would somehow be better. I don’t know if we made the right choice, Grey. Maybe Mom would have been fine staying in LA with shared custody. Maybe the judge would have let her live where she wanted. We were kids, we shouldn’t have had to weigh those options.”

Grey isn’t looking at me, his sharp gaze locked to the wall behind my head, his jaw tight. I reach over and take his hand. “The only thing I know for sure is that us staying together was the right choice.”

“I’ve been a shitty brother to you since then,” he says, voice rough.

“No. We both just…” I let out a breath. “I don’t know, Grey. We both got too hard, or something. Too defensive. Like we built walls for the rest of the world and then let that bleed into our relationship.”

“I can’t imagine why we would have built walls, as well adjusted as we were,” he says drily. But he squeezes my hand back, and I think we just might be letting those walls down a little.

“I want to ask you a question you won’t like.”

I sip my whiskey. “I can hardly wait.”

He turns to face me on the couch. “Do you even want to be an actress?”

“Sure.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Sure? That hardly sounds like this career is the passion of your life.”

I shrug. “Does it have to be the passion of my life? Can’t it just be a thing that I enjoy that I happen to be good at?”

“I guess. But what if there’s something else you would rather be doing and you just never gave yourself a chance because you were too eager to please Jimmy and Dad?”

“It’s not that simple, Grey.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I didn’t choose acting, how would I know that I wasn’t just trying to please Mom? I focused on school instead of acting as a teenager because I knew it would make her happy. After that, I could have done something outside the industry as a career like Mom wanted or I could have done Grandpa’s movies like Dad wanted—either way, how would I ever know I was doing it for myself?”