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My niece, Millie, is living here now, and she’s obsessed with baseball. It’s dragging the family’s love of the game back out into the open—everyone except Tabby. My youngest sister has never done an athletic thing in her life, I’m sure.
I park in the lot next to Xan’s truck and chew on my nerves as I make my way to them, weaving through the trees and out onto the field behind the school.
Millie sees me, and her grey eyes sparkle as I approach. She has my sister Delilah’s eyes. It’s kind of trippy.
“Uncle Zeke,” she squeals, sprinting away from her friend. She flings her arms around my waist. I hug her back tight. This kid is infectious. You can’t help but fall in love with her. Part of it could have been how she and her mom showed up last Spring with a psycho following them. Part of it is that she’s only ten but has the soul of someone much wiser. An emotional sponge and the most bubbly personality. It’s hard to be bitter around her because she’ll either sense it and call me on it or be her ten-year-old self and have me in folded over laughter in minutes.
“Are you going to practice with us?” Millie asks, pulling back and tilting her head to look at me.
I tug the brim of her baseball cap and shake my head. I haven’t touched a glove in years, and I don’t plan on it now. “Nah. Came to talk to your dad for a minute.”
I wave to Sarah on my way to Xan, who’s resting his forearms on the short fence by the dugout, eyes trained on his daughter and her friend. He turns to face me when I reach him.
“Hey,” he says with that typical Xan eyebrow lift thing he does when someone acts out of character. Texting my brother that I need to talk is definitely out of character.
“Hey.” I lean against the fence on the opposite side.
“What’s up?” He clasps his hands together, and his shoulders square in his dad stance.
The fact that Briggs showed up after ten years to drop the bomb on my brother that he was a dad wasn’t wasted on this guy. Xan has been acting like a dad since he was Millie’s age.
He certainly acted like mine and Tab’s dad, in ways he should never have had to. I shudder at the echo of the slamming front door and how it would shift Xan into another person. How hard the front door closed was usually a good indicator of how drunk Jason was and how our night would go and how on my brothers had to be.
I shake the coldness from my limbs and refocus on the warm sun absorbing into my black hoodie. Fuck that guy. He deserves no space in my mind, so I shove him out.
“Nova showed up this morning at the farm.” I can’t get out any more than that.
Xan startles, his blue eyes boring into me. “That girl from the shop?”
“Yup,” I say, crossing my arms as if that will protect me from having to say it.
“And? I’m assuming there’s more to this.”
I turn and look at Xan. His usual sternwhat the fuck did you dolook he reserves for me is gone. Instead, he looks at me in a way he hasn’t for years.
With concern.
“She’s pregnant.”
Xan blinks a few times, and then shifts his body so he’s gripping the top of the fence. Disappointment flows through his breath as he hangs his head.
“Fucking hell, Ezekiel,” he empties his lungs, and then the stern glare is back. “You told me you used protection.”
“We did. It obviously didn’t work.” My tone hardens because I can’t handle this turning into yet another conversation about how I fuck up everything I touch.
“Okay, so now what? Is she staying? Where is she from?”
“Alabama.”
“Ala—shit, man.” He stumbles, adjusting again, so we’re eye-to-eye across the fence. His entire demeanour softens in an instant. “I’m sorry. I’m familiar with this feeling. It sucks. I’m sorry.”
He got his girlfriend, Briggs, pregnant when he was seventeen, and then they were ripped apart for ten years. Xan believed that Briggs never had the baby. It was a kick to the nuts when Millie showed up looking the spitting image of a Stryker. Not just for Xan, but all of us.
“We’re talking tomorrow. I’m not sure what to do or say.” I play with the strings on my hoodie and get lost in the sounds of the birds and the thud of the baseball into leather gloves and the shrill sting of Millie and Sarah’s laughter.
“Is she keeping the baby?” Xan lowers his voice.
“Yeah. That’s really all she told me. But how does that even work?” I plead with my brother to give me the answers. To tell me what to do. He fucking loves telling people what to do.
