Page 113 of Summer Holiday Lifeline

Stubbornly, he did not address the house or its choice of music. Another opinion was the last thing he needed.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

He spent the next few days diligently not thinking about what it meant that he wanted to spend every minute with Steven. The end of the summer loomed in a way that made him feel too desperate. Too on-edge.

Thankfully, Jet spent most of his waking moments either with Wyatt in the backyard, or at the Cabin helping with the finishing touches Ozzy was putting on the place to ready it for more residents. It was a good distraction for him and gave him some much-needed time away from his little sister in the company of someone his own age.

For her part, Shelly had enamoured herself of every other Oaks resident and a few neighbours, so she had no end of people willing to entertain her when she was home from her YMCA classes. It left Myles with time on his hands. Time to spend with Steven, and he took it.

That only left his nights, alone in the dark listening to the kids sleep, to fret over his situation. Or, if he was alone in the room behind the kitchen because he’d overdone it and his hip didn’t want to do three flights of stairs, he got to listen to the house creak like she was judging him and finding his efforts wanting.

He’d stopped asking the house for her opinion. She was wont to remind him where he’d come from, and he couldn’t tell if that was to contrast that dismal past with what he had now, or a warning that if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up back there.

Or maybe he was reading too much into the groaning and settling of an old house.

“But why would I?” he’d asked the ceiling one night. “Why would I end up back there? The others didn’t. They’re fine. I can be fine too.”

He wanted to believe he could be fine, and the kids could be fine, even back in Calgary. That the ties they’d established over the summer would be enough.

The house sighed and creaked unhelpfully around him.

Frustrated, he tossed his blanket off and sat up.

A window at the back of the room, looking out over the backyard, clattered. The curtain covering it billowed into the room, then fell flat again.

“What, Lassie? Should I go look out the window?”

The glass rattled with such force for a second, Myles thought it might shatter.

“Fine. Okay. Don’t wake everyone up.”

He went to the widow to gaze out through the fluttering array of leaves. The yards shared by the Oaks and the Cabin basked in a combination of moonlight and streetlight glow that left them colourless and eerie. To his surprise, he saw a familiar figure slumped on a picnic table in the backyard of the Cabin.

“Oz?”

The figure was scrubbing the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. That gesture, too, was familiar. And worrying.

Tossing on sweats, Myles hurried out of the room and down the back hallway to slip out into the semi-darkness of the backyard.

Ozzy was still sitting on the picnic table when he arrived.

“Hey.” He sat on the tabletop next to his old friend. “What’s this, then?”

Ozzy grunted.

“You need to talk?” Myles could listen. Maybe someone else’s problems would distract him from his own.

“I’m fine.”

“Because sitting alone in the dark when you have a perfectly devoted boyfriend who would fight dragons for you and thinks you walk on water seems fine.”

“He’s perfect,” Ozzy whispered.

“Poor you.”

“Are you going to listen or mock?”

“Sorry. I’ll shut up.”