You learnt the hard lesson. You learnt that a man can fight his way through life and still lose everything, or he can put his hands to work and build something worth keeping.
You are not the boy I found behind the workshop. You are not an inmate number either.
You are not defined by your worst day.
You are my son in every way that has ever mattered to me.
I did not give you blood but I gave you a place to come back to. And you gave me a reason to keep the lights on.
That was enough for me; it has always beenenough.
Look after the garage and the house, but mostly Skylar and Ava. Let them care for you, as well, Zane, because you can be a stubborn bastard.
I love you, son.
Rainer.
Rainer’s words sit heavy in my chest, pressing on places I thought had scarred over years ago. Turns out, grief is a sneaky bastard. It waits, then reaches up and grabs you by the throat with a dead man’s handwriting.
Behind me, the screen door creaks.
I don’t turn around. I am familiar with her steps. I have known them since we were seventeen, when she could walk across a room and make me forget the bad mood I had committed to.
Skylar crosses the boards barefoot and only then do I turn my head.
There she is.
The love of my life since we were stupid teenagers, with too much heat between us and not enough sense to know what to do with it.
Thirty-one now and she still has the kind of face that messes with my breathing.
Her hair is pulled into a messy knot atop her head and she wears one of my old shirts—its hem falling halfway down her thighs. The shirt is faded, the collar stretched, and somehow the sight of her in it still does more for me than any piece of lingerie ever has.
For the record, I have deep respect for both art forms.
One makes me want to drop to my knees in front of her and the other lacy items make me want to peel them off with my teeth.
She has a beer in each hand.
Her eyes drop to the letter in my hand, and her expression softens.
She passes me the beer.
As I take it our fingers brush for half a second. Fourteen years of that specific contact and it still does the same thing to me it has always done.
She lowers herself onto my lap, easy and familiar, as if the shape of us were decided years ago on a half-collapsed tin roof and the rest of life has just been catching up ever since.
My arm wraps around her waist.
She settles against me as she looks down at the letter.
She knows all the letters.
There are two. One for me. One for her. Rainer, being Rainer, made sure the people he loved had something to hold onto after he was gone.
Her hand covers mine and we sit like that for a while. The fireflies start doing their thing in the long grass beyond the fence.
Eventually, Skylar asks, “Are you okay?”
