“You heard me.” She poked him in the chest. “You’re a big dumb dad. You just let her leave like that?”
“Alexis,” Shepherd warned. “The last few days have been the worst of my life, andsheis the reason.”
She wiggled her snorkel bag at him. “Dad! You’re being so stupid right now!”
“I’m … what? Lex, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You think because I’m nine, I’m blind? No, Dad, I have eyes—unfortunately for both of us! Ginny likes you.Likelikes you! And I don’t know why, but I do know she looks at you like you’re some sort of hero, and it’sdisgusting.”
He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “Ginny doesn’t like me. She needed me. You’ll understand the difference when you’re older.”
Lex threw her bag down, her flippers thumping hard against the ground. “Oh my God, Dad! Are you hearing yourself? You think every time someone is nice to you, it’s some sort of scam? Jeez! I know Mom is mean to you, but God, get yourself together, man!”
Oscar, still holding the bag of cheese—though it was significantly emptier—nodded solemnly. “She’s right, dude. Maybe you’ve just … never had a woman appreciate you before?”
Shepherd glared at him. Tiredly, but angrily. He did not need the man who took his wife giving him advice about women. “She manipulated me, Oscar, so that I would help save her kidnapped mother. If youmustknow.”
Oscar’s chewing took on a contemplative quality. “Maybe she wasn’t manipulating you, though? What if she was just, you know, grateful? For everything you did? Maybe she actually likes you, and you’re too busy being grumpy to realize it?”
Shepherd’s glare disappeared. He tried, hard, to force it back.
“She looked like she’d been crying all night, Dad,” Lex said.
Shepherd rubbed the back of his neck. “That was … that was about her mom. Not me.”
Lex groaned so hard it was almost a growl. “Dad, you are the dumbest smart person I know. Ginny likes you, she appreciates you, she trusts you. You went on an adventure together that, sure, clearly didn’t end well.” She gestured to the overturned chairs and the cut pieces of rope. “But you’re just gonna—what? Throw that all away and be alone again? Because I am getting too old to keep hanging out with you.Plus, you’ll spend the next ten years moping about Ginny, and youknowit.”
“She’s right,” Oscar said, before tipping the bag into his mouth. “You’ll be unbearable.”
Lex grabbed her dive bag and slung it over her shoulder. “So, here’s the plan, Dad. I know you love plans so much. You’re going to get in your car and you’re going to go to Ginny’s house and you’re going to get yourself together and be her boyfriend. And Oscar is going to throw away that bag of cheese, wash his hands, and take me to Saltwater Scouts. If I get there early enough, I get to pick my own squid.”
Shepherd opened his mouth to argue, but Lex’s look forced it to close.
“What do you say, Dad?”
Shepherd sighed, dug his knuckles into his forehead. But his hands had stopped shaking. “Yeah. You’re—yeah. OK. You, uh, you really think she likes me?”
“Yes. And it’sgross. But if I’m not the Ring Bearer slash DJ at your wedding, I’ll riot.”
PART FOUR
FORTY-SIX
Shepherd hurried around the block to get to where he last parked his car. That felt so long ago now. He’d been so busy riding motorcycles and stealing clown paintings and being tied to chairs. If you had told him a week ago—well, a week ago, he would’ve been hung up on the idea of sleeping with Ginny and probably would have agreed to go along with whatever other hell came along with it. Because one-week-ago Shepherd was just as helplessly in love with Ginny as today Shepherd.
He got in his car, still wearing yesterday’s biker-adjacent jeans. The inside of his messy vehicle was at least ten degrees hotter than the scorching heat outside. The A/C blew what felt like straight fire for several, agonizing seconds before finally running cold. Shepherd pulled up the Kent address under “Recent” on his GPS, and took off. He wasn’t brazen about it. He followed the rules of the road. At least the ones that made sense. Some of them were more suggestions than laws, and he stayed on the right side of Felony vs Misdemeanor as he hurried to Ginny’s crazy family’s home. He couldn’t let the woman he loved—wow, did that make his heart clench even when the word was only real inside his head—face that den of vipers alone.
He wouldn’t letOscarface that den of vipers alone! Those people were nutso butso.
There was a marked police car in the Kent driveway, and an unmarked sedan across the street. Shepherd parked behind the sedan and was out of his seat the millisecond he’d pulled the keys.
Shepherd knocked on the door, waited half a heartbeat, and then let himself in. Rich people needed to get better at locking their doors.
“Hello?” he called out. “Ginny?”
There was movement in what he would’ve called the living room, but what the Kent’s called the receiving room. Bradley Kent stuck his head out. “Oh, Preston, good. Come here.”
Shepherd’s subconscious held on to the “good” in the sentence and forcibly shoved down the “Preston.” “Hey,” he said, and jogged over. “What’s going on?”
