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“What happened with Greer?”
He snorted. “I think she’s at Mom’s until tomorrow. Please ask her.”
“She’s not coming out to the site today?”
“No, she, Adaline, and Poppy are helping Mom organize all her craft stuff and albums on the shelves you built her. I saw all that crown molding and the backlighting by the way, you trying to gain son brownie points with all that extra shit?”
“Aren’t you the guy who added swings and skylights when you built her a chicken coop?”
Cameron let out a sharp exhale. “Fine, we’re even. Tell her I said hi if you go to the house.”
“Will do. I’ll be out there eventually,” I told him. “Let me know if you need anything from the shop.”
“Before I forget,” Cameron added, “Jax and I were thinking about grabbing a beer somewhere tonight. Want to join us?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t know. Let me see how I feel after work.”
“Doing more face masks tonight? Please take a picture this time.”
I hung up on him with a grim smile and let myself into the shop.
After I’d grabbed the tool belt I’d forgotten, I left my truck by the shop and walked over to the main house. Greer’s car was in her usual spot in front of the house, Mom’s car was in the garage, and I paused a moment when I noticed Poppy’s vehicle where Dad used to park.
I clenched my jaw against a sharp stab of pain and jogged up the steps onto the wraparound front porch. This time, I couldn’t ignore the empty rocking chair, and I realized just how pleasant a distraction all this stuff with Harlow had been.
Maybe that’s why you invited her to stay with you, a voice whispered at the back of my mind, but I swatted it away because I damn well knew it wasn’t true. Distractions didn’t actually help you forget that you’d lost someone. No matter how big or loud they were, nothing was bigger or louder than the gaping hole left in your life. Not at first, at least.
The hole in our family’s life was a lot more apparent here, at this place, and it forced me to face that sticky coat of shame that I’d kept busy so that I didn’t notice it as much. I didn’t want to notice the rocking chair where he’d sit and have his morning coffee. Didn’t want to notice the brown recliner where he spent almost all his time the past couple of months. Didn’t want to notice the colorful crocheted blanket that was always covering his legs.
Because if I didn’t notice those things, I could ignore how much it fucking hurt that he was gone. It helped, though, walking into the house and hearing laughter bouncing through the room.
In the kitchen, Mom, Adaline, Poppy, and Greer were looking at some old photo albums, leaning over each other and wiping tears of laughter off their cheeks. At the table in the dining area, Greer’s stepdaughter, Olive—a shy, quiet little thing—kicked her legs as she colored in a coloring book, completely impervious to the antics in the kitchen.
She spotted me first, hopping off her chair and running up to me.
I crouched down. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school, young lady?”
Olive motioned me closer. “We have the day off,” she whispered next to my ear.
“Ahh. Lucky girl.” I tilted my head to the table. “What are you working on over there?” Instead of wrapping herself around my legs or reaching her arms up for a hug, she merely grabbed my hand and dragged me over to the table, then pointed at the coloring book with an expectant smile.
I crouched next to the table while she clambered back into her seat. Olive was drawing a garden—probably better than anything I could draw, if I was being honest—with a little orange cat sitting in front of the tall grass.
“Is that Clarence?” I asked. I’d heard all about the orange and white kitten she’d taken home from one of the barn cat litters last year.
She nodded. “He’s big now.”
“Maybe you can invite me over to meet him someday, huh?”
Her eyes shone, and she nodded again.
I ruffled her hair, then stood. The sight in the kitchen was a happy one as I hooked a stool out from the island separating the kitchen and the dining area. Mom’s head was bent down as she kept laughing, Greer, Adaline, and Poppy all with the same long, deep brown hair and wide smiles.
Adaline extricated herself from the tangle of arms and came around to give me a hug. “When did you get here?” I asked.
She tweaked my beard. “Drove down from Seattle last night. Poppy said Mom was having a rough day.”
Adaline lived in Seattle with her fiancé, Emmett, in some giant house they’d just finished building. Their wedding was finally in the works now that their house was done, and I took a second to study her face.
