Ellie came storming back into the farmhouse like a fire of fury was running through her.

“Ellie?” Charlie asked.

She glared at him as she took off her coat and her boots. “Fuck him, Charlie. Fuck him and fuck you too.”

She grabbed her work bag, and she stormed past me, knocking me in the arm roughly as she did, her footfall heavy on every single stair as she made her way upstairs and then a slamming of a bedroom door.

When I turned to ask Charlie if he knew what the fuck was going on, he was pulling on his coat and boots and heading out the door in the direction of the barn and Finn.

What the fuck is going on?

I set about making a cup of hot chocolate. Ellie had been in the barn a while, and I figured she might be cold, and mum always said that the best thing we could ever do for Daphne when she was pissed off, was get her chocolate to say sorry, maybe it would help Ellie too.

I carefully carried the mugs of cocoa upstairs, and I looked around for the door that had been slammed closed. My room. Perfect. I moved the cup handles to one hand, and I opened the door, hoping I wouldn’t be in the firing line for Ellie’s anger once I did.

“I thought you might like something to warm you up.” I smiled holding the mug up for her to see.

“Thanks, Jude.” She pouted.

“Want to tell me what brought all this on?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Why are your brothers such dickheads?”

“Dropped on their heads at birth? Honestly, I’m not really sure.”

She smiled with a hint of laughter at my comment.

“Anything in particular that they have done to make them rank up there of your Dickheads of the Day list?”

“Maybe.” She frowned.

“You know, when I was a kid, I really wanted this one toy for Christmas. Christmas Day came and went, and that fat bastard in the red suit hadn’t produced a thing. Charlie got some money for Christmas that year, and Mum took him out shopping in the January sales. Well, needless to say, Charlie got that toy that I had been wanting, and all he did was tell me how good it was to play with it, but I wasn’t allowed to look at it or touch it, because it was his, and I was his kid brother.”

“I’m not a toy.”

I leaned against her arm with mine, feeling her sorrow. “No, you’re something far more precious, and if we can all fight hard over a toy, just think about what we would do for the heart of a fair maiden.”

I had just outed us all. Even myself. It really didn’t matter, as long as she got the idea.

“Jude, you know how I write books?”

I raised an eyebrow unsure of where this was going. “It might have come up in conversation once or twice, yes.”

“Well there’s this genre, now, I don’t write it, but it’s really popular. It’s called Reverse Harem, and it’s where one girl, or woman, can be in a relationship with several men at the same time, and they all know each other, know about each other, and other stuff. But it’s that one girl, and say, three men. Well, they learn to make it work somehow together, without pettiness and jealousy, they share her.”

And there it was, her point, in blinding clarity. “Share her?” I nodded my head, thinking about that for a minute. Thinking, if I could share the girl I had liked for all these years? I figured that I probably already was sharing her with my brothers, and had been for a long time, we all liked her, we all knew that the others liked her. “Share her,” I repeated again. “You enjoy your hot chocolate, and get some writing done. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”

She nodded, and with that, I got up, I had an idea now, and I needed to stop my brothers from killing each other when the solution was something that Ellie had clearly already thought about.