Page 6 of High Water

“He’s a…” Words aren’t my strong suit in this moment, and I look to Levi to describe what Bishop was to us. He’s not a brother. Not really. Not by blood. And it was only the last few years of us in high school together that he lived here. But he was family, or my father, I am fairly certain, wished he could have been. But then, he’d disappeared. Never once came back. Never checked on us. Never looked me up to tell me he was okay. Which, in this moment, makes him everything and nothing to me all at the same time.

“Family friend,” Levi fills in the gap I leave, looking annoyed with me for failing to recognize who he is.

It’s not that I’ve forgotten. It’s that the man I knew, however young he might have been, would never have left me hurting like this only to turn up alive, making jokes in the kitchen. So he must be a stranger. He has to be.

“Sorry. I didn’t expect a stranger in the kitchen.” Fallon echoes my thoughts, and I look up to see her flash me a questioning side-eye as she steps around me.

“He’s not a stranger. He’s working with us,” Levi chimes in when I don’t correct her. I look at my brother, silently asking how he could have brought Bishop back into our lives without any warning. But I don’t have more than half a second to contemplate it before Bishop reaches out to introduce himself to Fallon.

“My friends call me⁠—”

“Bishop. His name is Bishop.” I cut him off, and I see his brow arch in question at my behavior.

“Well, you have a good name at least,” Fallon compliments him.

“Thanks.” Bishop chuckles warmly. “What’s your name?”

“Fallon.”

I feel his eyes, a million silent questions passing behind them that I can’t see. I refuse to meet them. Not now. Not like this. But the clock is ticking. One trip to the kitchen for snacks on a girls’ night has changed everything I thought I knew.

TWO

Bishop

Present Day

Please give me the chance to apologize.

I fire off the text message to Aspen before I tuck my phone back into my pocket and sit down at the massive conference table. She’s ignored my first few texts since I returned to town. I had to leave abruptly after Levi’s recovery, and we never got a chance to talk. I’m desperate for a chance to clear the air with her, but she’s barely glanced my way. Avoiding me at every family gathering I’ve been invited to in the last couple of weeks, dodging me in the halls of the Avarice as we all work to get Seven Sins ready for its grand reopening, and once, quite literally jumping on the back of her horse on the ranch and riding off like I was invisible to her.

“Thank you for coming here today. We’ll be reading the will, and I’ll be explaining the different assets and how they’ve been assigned. As the executor, your grandmother has asked me to explain all the legalese for you.” The lawyer rattles off introductory remarks as I stare at the window. There’s a view of the city sprawling out toward the mountains, like it’s trying to crawl its way to the foothills and losing a bit of itself along the way to the vortex of the city. The blaring sound of honking cars and the bustle of the street below us drift through even the thickest glass, and bounce around the glass cage we’re encased in as he presents the last of my father’s legacy.

Grams is rapidly outliving her entire family. Her husband and her son, several of her siblings, and god knows how many cousins, aunts, and uncles were all preceding her in death. Luckily, or unluckily for her, she still has two grandchildren. My estranged older half brother, born from an affair my father had in the early days of his broken marriage to my mom, and me, the runaway scum who sided with my mother in the divorce and lived with the Stocktons once she fell ill.

I glance across the table at Chase and back to Grams. There was no love lost between them. Or between us, if we’re being honest. My Grams held all of us to high standards, and none of us lived up to them. She seemed to find me vaguely more tolerable than Chase, why, though, is beyond me. Whether it was sympathy for having to endure my father’s bullshit for years while Chase only had to survive a few rare holiday weekends, or that she just saw some of herself in me, I couldn’t say. Maybe both.

I just want the land I was promised. The ranch is defunct now, abandoned and overgrown. The barns are collapsing, and the main house might need to be torn down. They were as neglected as the rest of us. But the property abuts the Stocktons’ ranch, and there are memories and heirlooms I still want to salvage there. But as the lawyer reads the will, I see it all fading away.

There’s very little in the way of money or assets to be distributed beyond the ranch, and most of them have been seized or sold off to pay for his end-of-life care. A pocket watch that belonged to my great-grandfather goes to Chase, and a bowie knife from another ancient relative is assigned to me. But everything of value is gone. Panic wells in my gut as he drones on about the distribution of the small sum left in the bank account. What if the ranch was seized to pay unpaid debts too? Tax bills rarely made it to his desk, and it was even rarer to see one leave with a check attached.

He couldn’t have been that fucking reckless, could he? For all of his faults, and the list is a mile long, he always believed that the ranch was a legacy. Something he wanted to pass down in the family name from one generation to the next. I can’t believe he’d jeopardize it. But then he spent so much time at the bottom of a bottle that it was hard to say what his values really were at the end of the day. That depended on his mood and the day of the week.

“What about the ranch?” Chase must be having the same thoughts as I am.

“The ranch isn’t in the will,” the lawyer answers.

“Because it’s in mine,” Grams adds her two cents, her perfectly coifed beauty-shop curls barely swaying with her movement as she shifts in her chair.

“Yours?” Chase looks surprised. This would certainly lessen his chances of getting a piece of it.

“Mine.” She side-eyes him before she glances over at me and then beyond us to the expanse of the view beyond the glass. “I took possession of the ranch about ten years ago when your father was going through a rough patch. I didn’t want to see it squandered, and he needed the money. So, it’s mine now, and it’ll be left in my will when I pass.”

“And who do you plan to leave it to?” Chase presses his luck.

“Didn’t I say this was all they’d care about?” She looks at the lawyer and shakes her head in disappointment. I haven’t said a word, but she’s not wrong. “I’m leaving it to a distant cousin. They would be the next in line, and they have children to pass the land onto already.”

My heart drops to my stomach. Chase’s face contorts with the information.