Page 37 of Never Let Go

“How would you know?” Kane grinned at him. “You knew who you were in there with all along. It’s not really the same thing.”

Porter flipped him off. “It’s the same damn experience. All I’m saying is that you won’t know if you haven’t been through it, so go through it, and then we’ll talk again.”

“Can we get back to the subject at hand?” I asked before glancing at Porter. “Kane isn’t going to be goaded into signing up. I’ve already tried.”

My brother sighed. “Your loss, bro. But okay, what’s the subject at hand?”

“What to get for Amanda.”

Kane snapped his fingers. “Jewelry. It’s always going to be jewelry, but make it special. Like something that has symbolic meaning.”

Porter nodded approvingly, then adjusted his grip on the bottle again and took another sip. “Jewelry with symbolic meaning. That’s deep coming from the single guy in the room. You sure you don’t want to sign up?”

“Dead sure. Leave the recruiting to Hope, would you?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I guess I can. So jewelry then, huh?”

I nodded. “Jewelry. I’m sure I’ll find something that has some kind of connection to our conversations.”

“You will,” he said confidently before he suddenly frowned. “Hey, so Hope was telling me you had a real thing for the girl who settled Grandpa’s estate?”

“Shelby,” I said her name softly. “I did back in college, yeah, but you knew about this. We just haven’t talked about it for a while.”

“I thought the name rang a bell,” he mused before he refocused on me. “Anything happening on that front?”

I shook my head. “No, she’s great, but now that I’ve met Amanda, I’m not hung up on her. She’s seeing someone anyway, so we wished each other well and went our separate ways.”

“How boring,” Kane complained, letting out a deep sigh. “No estate settlement sex, then?”

My features contorted. “I don’t think estate settlement sex is a thing.”

“It should be,” he said confidently. “Everything sex should be a thing. Come on, we’re alive. We should celebrate that every day.”

“And we do,” I said. “We just don’t always do it by having sex.”

“That’s the real tragedy in the world,” he replied sadly. His head shook as he brought his bottle back to his lips.

Porter frowned at him, but then let it go, turning back to me instead. “It’s all settled now? It’s kind of hard to believe that he’s gone and that Mom will never get the chance to make up with him. I know she’s always wanted to.”

“She did?” Kane’s eyebrows pinched together. “Why? He wrote her out of his will because of who she married. That’s not exactly the actions of a loving father.”

I nodded. “We know, but she’s still sad about them cutting her off. Good or not, he was still her dad.”

I glanced back at my brother. “Do you think we should reach out to Grandma now that he’s gone?”

“She could’ve called years ago,” he said after thinking it over for a beat. “There’s nothing stopping her from calling now, either. I think it’s probably best to just leave the whole mess alone. The last thing we want is to dig up Mom’s old grudges for no reason.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “You’re probably right. I’m letting it go. We’ll see how it plays out, but I won’t reach out to her randomly.”

Porter grimaced at me. “Sorry, bro. I realize you must feel weird about it, but you didn’t ask him to leave you this money, and Shelby would’ve cleared it with the illustrious Mrs. Chesterfield. I really think it’s better to just let sleeping dogs lie.”

“Yeah. No. I’m with you.”

He was right, though. I did feel weird about it, especially because he and our mother hadn’t been left anything. Between Porter and me, we’d been taking care of our parents for a while though and we’d keep doing that. Mom was definitely going to benefit from my inheritance in a big way, but still, it didn’t feel quite right that she hadn’t been left anything directly.

On the other hand, it was better I felt weird about it than her feeling like she had to. If she wanted to reach out to her mother, then I supposed she would’ve done it. The best move was to just take things as they came and to support our mother any way we could, whenever we could.

With that thought in mind, I dropped the subject. Kane, Porter, and I shot the breeze for a while before they finished their drinks and left. For the next eighteen or so hours, I wondered if jewelry was the right thing to get for Amanda or if I should just leave that too, but I really didn’t want to.