“Come in!”

The sound of my brother’s voice takes me totally aback. For once, he doesn’t sound pissed off, ready to come after me with swinging fists. And to think he was a nerd in high school. Back then, he never would have raised a hand to anybody. It’s not like he’s ever actually punched me, I guess, but when I joined the Army two weeks after graduation, he was the most irate I’ve ever seen him. Looking back, maybe it was fear that made him so pissed off. 

The week before I left was a tense one, to say the least.

“Hello!” Minnie calls the word from her spot in my arms, waving merrily even though I haven’t opened the door yet.

“Wait a second, sweetheart,” I tell her, then take a deep breath and open the door.

We step into the foyer of exactly the kind of house I’d always expected my brother to own: big and tidy and everything in neutral shades. Somewhere, I guarantee it, he’s got an office with one of those computers with three separate monitors or some shit like that. It’s probably in the basement. He’s got an office in town for all his other business ventures. Jamie is one of those small-town entrepreneurs who’s got his hands in every single market, including landscaping. Now that daycare is a done deal, I’ll be going out with him on jobs. We’ve discussed that much in a series of terse texts.

“I’m in the kitchen. You can come on back.”

I shouldn’t be this nervous to see him, but it’s been a few years, and things have obviously changed. I follow the sound of his voice down a hallway with hardwood floors—nice as fuck—and into a wide, bright kitchen. My brother, skinnier than me with dark hair, stands at the sink. His hands work over a carrot he’s peeling, one of those thick orange ones that’s clearly from the farmer’s market.

Lakewood would have a farmer’s market. 

“Say ‘Hello, Uncle Jamie,’” I tell Minnie.

“Hi, Uncle Jamie,” she says, looking shy, pulling her baby doll closer in.

My brother takes a deep breath and sets the peeler down in the sink alongside the carrot, then turns. For all our differences, he has the same eyes as I do. And Minnie.

“Hey, squirt,” he says, and then he can’t help himself. He grins at her, and she gives him her biggest toddler smile. Nobody can help themselves around Minnie. “Nice to meet you. Finally.” It’s a jab at me, but a pretty mild one, considering.

I look him in the eye, the three of us standing there in silence. Well, screw that. I’ve got limited time here, and Jamie was never the enemy. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he says back, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“About leaving town without warning you…”

He wrinkles his forehead. “Are you talking about six years ago?”

“Yeah. About that—”

“That was a total di—” Minnie is still grinning at him, and he cuts himself off abruptly. “That—that was a silly thing to do.”

“The silliest thing to do,” I echo him.

“Silly,” says Minnie solemnly.

“I’m sorry.” 

Jamie scowls at me for a split second, but Minnie is just too damn cute. “You missed out on a lot.”

“Like what?”

“Jamie, who are these lovely people?” The voice singing out from behind us is somehow familiar, but I can’t place it until she flits by me, moving across the kitchen and planting a kiss on Jamie’s cheek. Then she laughs like this is all some kind of wonderful joke. “Ryder! Jamie didn’t say you were coming to visit.”

I gape at her, my mouth hanging open.

“Hi!” Minnie says, waving.

“Hi, sweetheart! What’s your name?”

“I’m Minnie!” says Minnie, and immediately starts squirming to get out of my arms. “Minnie!”

I finally break out of my own stunned silence. “Poppy Harwood, what are you doing with my brother?” Yes, she kissed him on the cheek, but there’s no way. There’s no way that he and Poppy Harwood, the queen of his class in high school, are—

She laughs, flipping her blonde hair over her shoulder. “He’s a good roommate.” Then she crouches down, a big grin on her face.

Minnie untangles herself from my arms and goes shyly over to her, tentatively holding out her baby doll. “Baby doll,” she says, and then pushes it out another two inches.

Poppy claps one hand to her chest and reaches out to take the doll, still holding it within Minnie’s reach. “Oh, she’s beautiful,” she says. “What’s her name?”

“It’s a baby doll,” says Minnie.

I have to go back to my brother on this because I have to know how he landed the most popular girl in his class—no, the entire school. Nobody was on a higher tier than Poppy Harwood. Homecoming Queen. Prom Queen. All that shit, and then amplified a thousand times over. And here she is, fawning over Minnie’s doll like she’s just a regular person. 

Living with my brother, like he’s not the most regular nerd you’ve ever met in your life. 

He glances down at the pair of them and then turns back to the sink. The carrot and the peeler are out in a flash and on a clean paper towel next to the sink, and then he’s reaching into the fridge for a couple of beers.

No formal invitation needed. I’m in.

It feels almost normal following him out to the back deck. It feels almost right. I’ll miss this at the end of the summer when I leave.

The patio has a furniture set—a real, honest-to-god set of patio furniture—and we both take seats. Open beers. Look at each other one more time.

“You have patio furniture, Jamie. What else have I missed?”

“Poppy, for one,” he says with a satisfied little smile that I’ve never seen on his face before.

“Are you actually just roommates? Or did you marry her in secret?”

He rolls his eyes. “No, asshat. I didn’t marry her without telling you.”

“You could have.”

“You’d have deserved it.” He’s damn right, too. I didn’t tell him—or my parents—that Angie was pregnant until Minnie was born. I was that fucking ashamed of the whole thing. Not Minnie herself—I could never be ashamed of her. But Angie—shit. That was a disaster from the very beginning. 

“I know.” The words practically choke me, but it’s now or never. “I’m sorry.”

Jamie leans back with a nod and takes a swig of his beer. “So what the hell happened to you?”

How can I explain it to him? I graduated by the skin of my damn teeth, and the Army seemed like a way out of the town we’d grown up in. Southeast Michigan had nothing to offer me. War seemed like some grand adventure. After I learned it wasn’t, Angie seemed like a grand adventure. I didn’t realize until it was too late that she was more of a suicide mission.

I want to tell him everything, but I can hear Minnie’s voice. She’s giggling, and I just can’t get into it now. Not when she could come bursting out here at any second.

“It all went wrong,” I say.

Jamie’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t press me. He was furious when I left home. Furious. But maybe I’ve been seeing it all wrong. Maybe it’s the years since then that have been the worst for him. They were for me, damn it.

“Lakewood’s nice,” he says into the silence.

“Yeah.” I look out over his lawn, at the ring of trees surrounding it that bleed into the forest behind. “I probably won’t stay long.”

“No?”

“Just the summer. I rented a place through August.”

“So you’re just passing through?”

I open my mouth, and an image of Valentine’s cheeks, blushing pink, pops into my head. “Just passing through,” I tell him, but even I’m not totally convinced.

Another swig of beer glides down my throat, and Poppy’s voice floats out the window, singing Itsy Bitsy Spider. Minnie is beside herself with laughter and then joins in, her little voice high and pure. I lock eyes with my brother. Despite how fucking awkward this whole thing is, he’s one of the only people on earth that I trust. “Jamie.”

He gives me a wary look.

“What?”

“I have to ask you a favor.”