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I snorted my amusement. “I don’t need him to love me. I need my name in that owner spot on the paperwork when he retires.”
“You don’t want that. Tony wouldn’t have wanted that for you.”
That pain was back. The spear skewering me. Making it hard to breathe. I clenched my fist and jaw and waited out the feeling, but it didn’t fade. Why did Hudson have to bring him into this? “Fuck you.” It was a struggle to keep my voice even. Hard. “You don’t get to say his name.”
Because Hudson didn’t take my side, he took Tony’s when Tony go si—
“I need you to trust me on this,” Hudson silenced the thought in a way I couldn’t by myself.
“But I don’t trust you. You see that’s the issue, right?”
“Just—”
“Thanks for the Wendover recommendation,” I talked over him. “Loved the score. Talk to you when this is over.” I hung up before he could counter-quip me.
This hurt so much. If I hadn’t dealt with it for months straight in the past, I’d think I was having a heart attack now. As I breathed through my nostrils and tried to count through forgetting the wonderful things, the way I lost them, that caused this pain, my gaze landed on my keys.
On the gold and platinum vial that hung with my keys. The object was custom made from his and my rings that held some of Tony’s ashes inside.
“Why did you leave me?” I asked the empty room. It wasn’t the first time I’d needed to know that, and I didn’t expect any more of an answer than I’d gotten in the past.
None of that eased the ache in my heart.
7
Evie
I’d never been a morning person, but the military and then owning a store I would do anything for had me in before ten, doing the early opening ritual I’d learned from Grandpa as a kid.
I strolled up one aisle and down the next, checking each section and making sure it was all in order, that there wasn’t anything out of place, or any low stock I needed to replenish. While I roamed, while my mind drifted over so this is what forty feels like, snippets of the past slipped in.
Originally, I wasn’t Grandpa’s choice to take over. A lot of the families around here had passed their land and businesses down through the men in their lines. But my mom and dad were career military—they met in the Navy—and they expected their sons would do the same.
Except the twins that they were told were both male were actually one boy and one girl. They were never cruel about it, not even in a backhanded kind of way—Mom and Dad loved me regardless—but I wanted to do what Grandpa did. I wanted to build stuff and design things and figure out how the entire world worked.
I turned and headed down the aisle with the electronics components. This was the one I’d insisted we add years ago, after I realized I couldn’t do career military. After I came back home with my tail between my legs, and discovered Grandpa had left me the shop when he passed.
In the years leading up to that, he and I found the things we had in common, and I taught him how to build small robots out of cheap RC cars.
I trailed my fingers over the shelf with the solder. Weird thing to be sentimental about, but I was.
My phone rang, yanking me from the clashing good and bad memories, and Eddie flashed on the screen.
“Yo.” I answered my brother’s call. Our real names weren’t Evelyn and Edward, though we let most people believe it. I was Eowyn and he was Eomir—our parents were huge LotR geeks.
Probably better names than Boromir and Faramir like they originally wanted to give us.
“Hey, old lady. You get the walker I sent you yet?” Eddie was cheerful. The bastard had probably been up for five or six hours already.
Early mornings. Gross. “Is that what that was? I thought you sent me your scrap metal to make an obstacle course for Destructy.”
“You pulled that poor thing out of retirement? He’s the one who needs a walker.”
Destructy was the biggest robot I’d built with Grandpa, and got his name not because he was meant to destroy things, but because I’d rammed him into a shelf full of hammers during his first test drive, and sent five aisles toppling like dominos.
That was the day Grandpa first mentioned me taking over—after we spent hours cleaning up and I figured out how to put the shelves up so it wouldn’t happen again. That was also one of the happiest days of my life. I’d done everything for this place, and it was all going so well.
Until Travis.
