Page 79 of Summer Holiday Lifeline

Steven was in the kitchen now, and he set the phone down long enough to pull a TV dinner from the freezer, rip open the box and peel back a corner of the plastic. He snapped a pic of the meal before popping it into the microwave.

Myles sent a throw-up emoji back.

STEVEN: Speak for yourself. I splurged. Got the expensive ones. Not half bad.

MYLES: Not home cooking.

STEVEN: No.

Steven was tempted to challenge Myles to come over and show his home cooking when an image popped into the chat. He enlarged it to see Jet sticking his tongue out at the camera, with Shelly asleep on his lap.

Myles’s accompanying text read:

MYLES: Long drive today. Looks like bath, story, tuck-in time around here.

Another picture came, this time with Myles in the frame and Jet looking almost happy.

STEVEN: Looks like. Have a great evening.

No way was he even going to ask. Myles was exactly where he should be, with his kids, doing exactly what he should be doing.

The microwave shrilled at him, and he set the phone down. A quick “night” flashed on the screen, and he nodded.

It was going to be a night. And tomorrow, another day. He could do this.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Coming out of the bathroom from his turn in the shower, Myles found Jet and Shelly both asleep on his bed. On the TV tray, glowing blue aliens swung through floating islands on Jet’s computer screen.

It was easy enough to move the laptop and set it aside, but Myles was loath to wake either of the kids. They looked too peaceful to disturb. The afternoon had been a good one. Jet looked as close to happy as he’d seen him since he’d found out his mother was dying, so waking them now felt like asking for trouble.

He considered sleeping in Jet’s bed, but one glance behind the divider changed his mind. With clothes strewn across the end of the bed and papers and coloured pencils spread everywhere, he neither wanted to, nor felt the right, to move Jet’s things.

Curiosity got the better of him, though, and he glanced over the pages full of drawings. Some of them were clearly Shelly’s. Odd that Jet kept all his sister’s drawings, given how vocal he was about how unsettling he thought they were.

His own drawings held much more of Myles’s interest. He held one up to the lamplight to study it. It was a human head, drawn from a tangle of coloured pencil lines, not unlike Shelly’s scribbles, but with intent. After a moment, Myles recognized Natalie’s face in the depths of the myriad lines. The more he looked at it, the easier it was to see his sister’s likeness.

Another picture was of Shelly bent over Emma, the cat who even looked calico in the jumble of colour on the page. There was one of Kreed, his bushy beard making his image easy to untangle, and another of Ozzy.

It was amazing enough to Myles that Jet had the talent to make any drawing of a face take on the distinct characteristics of one person or another. More interesting to him was this mimic of Shelly’s tangled, nonsensical style that managed to pull some kind of order from that chaos.

The image of Ozzy kept his attention the longest. There was nothing particularly distinctive about his face. Not like Kreed’s beard or Tris’s pixie-like delicacy, or even Lucky’s wide, bright smile. Ozzy was decidedly average, with short dark hair, brown eyes, and a stubbled jaw. You had to know him well, spend time with him, to understand the depth in his eyes. Most people never saw it at all. He was quiet, strong, and deadly deep.

Jet caught that undertow in his expression perfectly, and Myles couldn’t even pinpoint how, exactly.

Or maybe he was superimposing his own ideas onto a drawing.

With a sigh, he dropped the picture back to the bed, turned off the lamp, and left Jet’s space alone.

He was far too big for the child’s cot tucked under the dormer in Shelly’s tidy if modest corner of the room. He had no desire to sleep under the blue and purple pony comforter anyway—the one thing he’d found stuffed into her little pink suitcase when they had arrived.

Jet had sacrificed half of his shoe bins for her clothes and toys, Myles had later realized, when he noticed that Jet wore the same few pairs of shoes over and over, instead of showing off his vast array. That’s what big brothers did. They made sacrifices so their little sister could be happy.

Jet got that right. Myles had waited almost too long to be the big brother Natalie had deserved. But she had done an outstanding job raising Jet. Myles had a long way to go if he hoped to do half that job with Shelly.

He wasn’t going to do it tonight.

Carefully, he eased a pillow from Shelly’s side of his bed and settled on the couch in the center of the room, using a blanket from its back to cover his legs. He supposed he could go down to the extra room off the kitchen, as he sometimes did when he didn’t want to do the stairs, but he was already up here, and the good day he’d had with the kids made him want to stick close.