The townhouse was its usual organized chaos when I got back—Jude’s gear spread across the living room from a shift change, the remains of what had probably been a perfectly good lasagna hardening in a pan on the stove, a basketball game on the television that nobody was watching.
I started pulling boxes from the closet.
Jude appeared in the doorway with a beer in each hand, registered what I was doing, and leaned against the frame with the expression of a man who had questions but was choosing hisorder carefully. He looked at the box in my hands. He looked at the duffel I’d thrown on the bed. He looked at me.
“Are we moving?” he said.
“I am.”
“Where are we moving to?”
“Riverside Pines. I’m borrowing Mom and Dad’s trailer. Taking the lot next to Becca’s.”
Jude took a long pull from his beer, set the second one on the dresser within my reach, and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe.
“Matt called you,” he said.
“We had coffee at Holloway’s.”
“And now you’re moving to Riverside Pines.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Because of Becca.”
“Because Travis is circling and she won’t stay with Matt, and somebody needs to be nearby.”
“Right.” He nodded slowly, in the exaggerated way that meant he was being very deliberate about not saying the obvious thing yet. “And this somebody needs to be you specifically.”
“I was available.”
“Uh huh.” He looked at the ceiling for a moment. “You know what’s funny? I’ve been your brother since birth, and you still try this with me. The reasonable-voice thing. The I-was-just-in-the-neighborhood thing.” He looked back at me. “You packed a duffel bag in four minutes flat, Levi. You haven’t packed that fast since the academy.”
I put another shirt in the bag and didn’t dignify that with a response.
“I’m just noting,” he said, “for the record, that normal people do not relocate their entire living situation because a woman they are definitelynotin love with might need someone nearby.”
“I’m not relocating my entire living situation. It’s temporary. She needs—I don’t know what she needs, but I’ll be there when she needs it. Okay? It’s not a big deal.”
He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room properly, dropping into the chair in the corner with the easy sprawl of a man who’d decided he was staying for this conversation, whether I wanted him there or not. He spun his beer bottle slowly between his palms. “Matt’s a good guy,” he said, and his voice had shifted, the humor still there but underneath it something more careful. “I’m not saying he isn’t. But all he cares about is Becca. Their parents are shit. He practically raised her himself. You know that.” He looked at me steadily. “You’ll be under the bus, with a broken heart, and he won’t care as long as she’s okay.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not wrong,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“So you’re going anyway.”
I folded a flannel shirt and set it in the duffel. “She’s out there alone, Jude. Travis is circling. Matt’s losing sleep over it, and he’s not a man who loses sleep easily.” I reached for another shirt. “And yeah, maybe this is something I should think about more carefully, but she’s alone, and I know how to be nearby without making it a thing. So I’m going to be nearby.”
Jude was quiet for a moment, turning the bottle in his hands. “You know what kills me?” he said. “It’s not even that you’re doing it. It’s that you’re going to be really good at it and she’s going to let you be nearby and you’re going to be so damn happy about that that you won’t notice you’re also miserable.” He paused. “That’s the part that keeps me up at night. Not the Travis stuff, not the Matt stuff. Just you, sitting in a borrowed trailer in the cold, grateful for the scraps of her attention.”
“That’s a bleak picture.”
“I’m a realist.”
“You’re a catastrophist.”
