"Believe me, I'm well aware."
"It's got your kind of twisted logic all over it though." He flicked the paper again. “But if you’re okay with it, I’m going to burn this fucking thing.”
I clapped my hand on his shoulder. "I am so sorry. For everything. For all the things I did to you that I wasn't even aware of. You know? While I was away? Any time I wanted to be a better person, I pretended I was you. You're the best man I know, and, well, you deserve better than a brother like me."
"What I deserve has nothing to do with it,” he said flatly. “You're my brother.” He stood up and pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the notification on the screen. Then held it out for me to read. “And you’re theirs too.”
I leaned in. It had been sent eight minutes ago, and we were exactly eight minutes out of town.
Jonah: I’m with Gabe. We’re on our way.
Chapter Forty-One
Finn
Beau stood next to me. Not closely. But close enough that I felt strong enough to look my two older brothers in the face.
“Well then,” Gabe finally cracked. “No one’s gonna punch him in the face? Now I know we’re going soft.”
Jonah sniffed. It might have been a laugh.
And then we collapsed back into an awkward silence.
“You good?” Jonah checked in with Beau.
My twin shrugged. “Getting there.”
“You good?” Gabe narrowed his eyes at me.
It was my turn to shrug. “Getting there,” I echoed.
Gabe looked at Beau. Beau looked at the ceiling. And Jonah mumbled a long string of curse words before throwing his hands in the air. “Welp! I don’t know about you three, but I am way too fucking sober to be having this conversation right now.” He turned to the door. “I’m headed to the Crown,” he called over his shoulder. “If you dipshits want to have this out, then meet me there.”
Gabe set down our beers, then turned back and grabbed his drink.
I stared at it. And then him. “What the fuck is that?”
Gabe looked down at the luridly pink concoction in front of him. “Virgin strawberry daiquiri,” he declared.
“Did you hand over you cock and balls to get it?” Jonah wanted to know.
“Hey fuck you. It’s delicious and I’m secure enough in my masculinity to enjoy a fruity pink drink.” He sat back. “Plus if I have to be sober during this conversation while the rest of you get to drink, then I deserve to enjoy myself.” He punctuated this tirade by taking a prim sip from his straw - pinky elevated.
“This is what happens when you leave, Finn.” Jonah was looking at Gabe with exaggerated concern. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him.”
I leaned forward, figuring this was my invitation to start explaining, but as I did so, I caught Beau’s eye.
It’s a twin thing. I can’t pretend to understand how I know what he’s thinking. It’s that connection that formed in the womb.
And fuck, I really missed it.
“We good?” my raised eyebrow asked.
“Getting there,” the slight tension at his jaw replied.
“Good enough I can fuck around with Gabe again?” the tilt of my head wondered.
“Have at it,” his lifted chin agreed.
Gabe looked at Jonah. “They’re doing it.”
“I know,” Jonah sighed, drumming his fingers on the table. “Can’t you two use your mouths to talk like the rest of us normal people?”
“You might not like what it has to say,” I shot back. Beau smirked.
“Why, what the fuck were you just saying about me?” Jonah’s ego was his Achilles’ heel and the three of us exploited that mercilessly.
“I was saying,” I leaned back and closed my eyes. “I was saying… I’m sorry. I don’t know... I can’t explain why I thought what I was doing was the right thing. I just….” I let out a long breath as my brothers watched me closely. “There’s something in my head that hates me.” I nearly choked on the admission. “And it had me convinced you were all better off without me in your life.”
“What changed?” Jonah asked after a beat. His tone was cool and neutral. Business Jonah, our oldest brother and leader. I recognized it as the same wary tone he used to sniff out bullshit. If he detected a single whiff of it, you were toast.
I pressed my hand flat on the table. Talking about her made my stomach clench. “I met someone.”
“Sky,” Beau supplied.
“Wait, you have girl-?” Gabe started, but I held up my hand. Because if I didn’t tell them this now, I wasn’t ever going to say it
“No. I don’t.” I took a deep breath. “Not yet, anyway.” Gabe gave an approving nod. “I fucked it all up because I thought I knew how it would end. That voice, it had me convinced that there was no way I was good enough for her. But the thing that was different was that I -.” I rubbed my temples vigorously. “I didn’t’ want to hear it this time. Instead of agreeing with it, I finally started to argue.” The buzz of the bar slid away as I heard myself saying things I’d been too afraid to express in words. “And then I set out to prove it wrong. Fuck you, voice. Right?” I opened my eyes and looked at my brothers. “You probably aren’t surprised that I wanted to get in a fight. The difference was - ."
“You were fighting for yourself.” Gabe was nodding like this made sense.
I suddenly needed to reach out and grab his hand. He looked startled, but closed his hand around mine in an awkwardly bent handshake. “Yeah. Exactly. I didn’t recognize it at the time," I told him. "Like I said, I really thought I was just finding another new and delightful way to be a dick to myself. But somewhere along the way I started to think I might actually be wrong about myself.”
“You are,” said Beau.
The corner of my mouth jerked up involuntarily. I felt naked. Stripped down and bare. My fists were clenching, fighting still. Fighting the feeling of being vulnerable. “I don’t believe it. Yet. But the difference is, now I want to.”
“For her.”
“For me,” I corrected. “For you.” I nodded at Beau. “And then, maybe… someday…” I trailed off, for the first time allowing myself the fantasy of knocking on Sky’s door. Bringing her flowers, taking her to dinner. Something healthy.
And normal. Could I do that?
I looked around the table at my brothers. All three of them had found love already and all three of them had gone through their own unique hells to find it.
If I felt vulnerable before, now I felt downright pathetic. But it couldn’t be helped. This was an emergency. This was… Sky.
“Guys?” I asked. “How the fuck do you… date?”
Chapter Forty-Two
Sky
Yesterday, I’d stopped by the lawyer’s office and gotten my Dad’s house officially transferred to my name. Today, Livvy was meeting me after she got off work and taking me furniture shopping before I moved in on Saturday.
“See what you need,” she’d told me before leaving this morning. “Swing by and make sure all those people didn’t like, destroy the place. Last thing you want after all of this is to move in and and find out the bed is missing.”
So that’s what I had set out to do.
But now, as I stood on the sidewalk in front of the house that was now legally mine, I couldn’t bring myself to even walk up to the front door.
I looked up and down the street. It was a nice enough neighborhood, all boxy two-story colonials with identical rectangles of green front lawn. Very middle-class pride gone frayed around the edges. I could hardly picture my train-crash of a father fitting in here. They must have hated him, and I bet he relished the chance to hate them right back.
His house - my house - was sided in white with black shutters around the windows. It looked so normal from the outside that it seemed familiar. But that was only because I’d seen houses jus like it all over America. There was nothing about it that said, ‘This is where Bill Clarence Knight lived, this is where he raised one family
while keeping the other one a secret.’
In fact, out of all the places in Crown Creek, this felt the least touched by his hand. There was nothing of him here. No ghosts lurking around corners ready to ambush me with his handwriting or his face on a plaque. I looked at it and felt nothing.
And that scared me.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the key so tightly that it dug into my hand. And I tried. I tried to summon him. I tried to call up those old, faded memories, those moments I had relived so many times they now ran like movies in my head. I watched them, but I didn’t recognize the girl in the starring role. She loved her father with a blind devotion that was almost religious. And what about him? Had he loved her?
He must have. In his own way. Because he left this for her… for me.
I opened my eyes. I hadn’t been forgotten or discarded, no matter how many times I’d been convinced of that fact since the funeral. He’d remembered me and wanted to give me a piece of him.
But now the question was, did I want it?
I swallowed hard and unclenched my fist, feeling the sting of the blood returning to the crevices the key had dug into my hand. This gift wasn’t actually for me, though. It was for him. A way to absolve himself before dying without telling me the truth. If I walked into this house, I’d be tying myself to him. I’d be beholden to his memory. I’d be accepting just another scrap of his love instead of the wholeness I deserved.
I stepped back. I didn’t want to be tied to bad memories any more. I didn’t want to live in the shadow of his betrayal, or accept his token acknowledgement. Accepting it would mean I accepted what he’d done to me. And to everyone who loved him and who he supposedly loved.
I’d thought it was my legacy, but it was just one more bribe to keep me on his team.
I blinked rapidly, but I didn’t need to. I was done shedding tears for my father.
I drove back across town. The gate was actually open since it was during business hours.
It felt strange to pull in to Knights’ garage and walk up to the office door without any drama or hesitation.
But there was no need for that anymore.
J.D. looked up from his books and scowled when he saw me. “You came alone? No posse?”
“Do I need one?” I challenged him.
His scowl lessened. “It’s your call. But I don’t think so.”
I squeezed the key in my hand until the teeth sank into my palm, digging into the flesh until the mark was left there. It hurt.
Then I let it go.
J.D. jerked back when I slapped my hand down on his desk. “What’s this?” he stared at the key like he’d never seen one before.
“I don’t want it.”
He snapped his head up. “You’re serious?”
I let my shoulder lift in a shrug. “I don’t want to owe him.”
J.D. was my brother. With eyes so like mine that if I held his gaze and looked nowhere else, it was like looking right into a mirror. He shared those eyes with my Dad.
Our Dad.
Something was happening to his face. The grim, serious set of his jaw softened.
And for the first time I saw my brother smile.
That was just like mine too.
“Damn,” he said, chuckling as he shook his head side to side. “Damn.” He reached over and covered the key with his hand. “You know? It took me nearly a whole lifetime with him before I figured out what a fraud he was. You sure caught up quick.”
“I must be the smart one in the family,” I quipped.
He laughed. Big and loud and full-throated. It caught the attention of Rocky and the silent brother whose name I still didn’t know. They came to the office door in their coveralls. When they saw me, they both stepped back, but J.D. held up his hand. “Hey guys, c’mere. There’s someone here you gotta meet. This is Sky…” he paused and waited for me to supply the name.
“I dunno.” I shook my head. “Sky Knight? If you go last name first, that reads Knight Sky and I don’t know if I can live with that kind of pun.”
“Lennon here was almost named Ryder.” Rocky socked his silent brother in the side. I finally knew his name.
“Knight Ryder?” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Oh God, he loved that show. He used to make me watch the reruns when he was home.”
My brothers stiffened a little when I mentioned “home,” but for the first time, I didn’t let that bother me.
“So this is Sky Clarence,” J.D. went on, giving me a nod. “She’s our sister, as you know. But she’s also sort of a badass.” He gestured to the key.
“Sort of?” I protested as the two men stared at it. “Only sort of?”
Rocky was the first to come forward. He rushed to me, paused, then held out his hand. “Sky?” He rested his hand on my shoulder, then let it slide down my arm like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to touch me yet. “Is this what I think it is?”
I nodded. “I want a fresh start. You guys can put it to way better use than I can.”
Rocky looked at J.D., who nodded and picked up his phone. As he stalked out of the office, I heard him greet the person on the other end. “Yeah Dinah? You can send them. We’ve got a place all ready.”
“This is awesome, Sky,” Rocky said. It sounded like he was choking up. “This is more than I ever….” He blinked and then coughed.
“More than you thought I’d be capable of?”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “We didn’t know you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t either.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Sky
That evening, I stayed close to the window, waiting for Livvy’s gray hatchback to pull in. I’d spent the afternoon searching out a list of rentals, but needed her help to figure out which ones were a good fit. Small as it was, I was still learning my way around this town.
Finally I heard the squeal of tires turning in to Livvy’s driveway. Which was weird, because Livvy was a pretty cautious driver and I’d never heard her tires squeal before. I went up my my tiptoes and saw the reason why.
It wasn’t Livvy’s gray hatchback pulling in to the driveway. It was Claire’s white Jeep.
She honked the horn until I locked the door behind me, then rolled down the window. “Get in! If we move fast, we’ll have time to see all four places before we meet everyone.”
Livvy emerged from the passenger seat. “I couldn’t stop her. When I told her you wanted to see apartments, she showed up five minutes later to pick me up from work.” She shook her head. ”Honestly, I don’t think Superman himself could have stopped her.”
“Come on!” Claire shouted. “Get in, we’re on a schedule here! Give me that list. Livvy! Sit in the back so she can see better.”
She was bossy and bratty and a pain in the ass. And I was really glad to have her on my side. I grinned at my new friend, then slid into the passenger seat of her Jeep. It was pristinely white, polished and waxed on the outside.
The inside, to my surprise, was filthy.
Claire looked up from scanning my lists of addresses and caught me looking at the drift of trash on the floor. "Sorry,” she said. “I’ve kind of been living out of my car lately.”
“Why’s that?” I wondered.
“Working a lot of hours and stuff.”
“And going on a lot of dates,” Livvy piped up from behind us.
“That’s between you me and the wall,” Claire snapped. “Good Lord, don’t let my brothers find out.”
I sat up little straighter. “How are your brothers doing?” I asked innocently enough. I hoped.
She gave me a withering look. “Which one?”
“All of them?” I squeaked.
“Heh,” was all she said.
She turned down the road where my father’s funeral had been held. The church seemed like something out of a case of deja vu. I knew it had happened, but it felt like it’d happened to someone else.
Then Claire hit the gas and we slid past it and it was
gone. “Wait, isn’t that the address?” I cried as we flew past the first house on my list.
“Oh we’re not going there. I found you someplace better.”
I looked at Livvy who just laughed and mouthed “Sorry,” again.
“It was close to the middle of town," I protested.
His Secret Heart (Crown Creek) Page 21