8
The ambulance roared down the road, throwing up gravel and leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
Everything in Kit screamed for her to jump in her car and follow.
But she had an orchard full of people and there was already a crowd of Walkers on their way to the hospital and . . .
“I’m sure he’ll be all right, Kit.”
Lucas.
She hadn’t had more than a couple minutes to process the jolt of seeing her older brother standing in her office doorway before the chaos of Case Walker’s collapse outside had taken over. Now a weary numbness draped over her.
“He was so white. He wouldn’t wake up.” Fear clenched every muscle.
And there was something else, something Logan had said as the paramedics were loading the stretcher into the ambulance. “I told him not come today. It was too much. He knew he shouldn’t . . .”
He knew he shouldn’t what? Confusion had clouded Beckett’s eyes in response, and then he’d climbed into the ambulance. His gaze had found hers in the seconds before the ambulance doors closed. And in that moment, the papers she’d found, the Army application, none of it had been important.
Late-afternoon sun spilled from the sky now, drenching the landscape in fiery light. But a chill grabbed hold of her. She wound her arms around her waist.
“He’ll be all right,” Lucas said again.
Lucas. He’s here. He’s home.
She turned, willing her brain to focus. Shouldn’t she hug him? Come up with some kind of emotion other than shock? But she feared if she pushed past the surprise, anger might be the only feeling she’d find treading under the surface.
For ditching the orchard. For disappearing again. For scaring her all these weeks.
“Where were you?” She didn’t mean to sound so accusatory.
Or maybe she did. Or maybe it was just her clinging alarm. Please, let Case be okay. Beckett needs him. The prayer murmured through her.
“Huh, I thought maybe I’d get a ‘welcome home’ or something.” Lucas shrugged. “It’s been two years, after all.”
For the first time since he’d appeared in her doorway, she looked at him—really looked. The gaunt frame he’d brought home from the Middle East had filled out in the years since his prison release. His dusty brown hair was long enough to be pulled into a disorderly ponytail of sorts; his skin, coppery.
If not for the dull gray of his eyes, she might’ve said he looked healthier than she’d seen him in years. Almost like the Lucas she remembered from childhood—easygoing, quick to laugh, but always with a protective, brotherly bent. Why couldn’t she find the welcoming words he was obviously waiting for?
“You disappeared. You fired Willa. The trees were infected.” She spun, suddenly un-numb, overcome. She hastened toward the store.
“It was too much, Kit. I never asked for this responsibility.”
She lurched into the store, glanced around. Only one customer wandered through the space. What had happened to their crowd?
And who even cared in light of Case, Beckett, Lucas?
Her brother’s footsteps thumped on the floor behind her. He must have grabbed an apple from a barrel, because she heard the crunch of his bite. She moved to the row of glass-fronted refrigerators along one wall. Cold air billowed over her cheeks when she opened the first door. She began organizing the shelves of cider and other juices, filling empty spaces and turning jugs so they faced the front.
“You just left, abandoned the place. I had no idea where you were. Do you have any idea what that felt like, Luke?” Her fingers numbed in the cold of the refrigerator. “It’s like it was 2005 all over and—”
“Don’t.”
The darkness in his tone was enough to make her stop, turn. The refrigerator door bumped closed behind her, and there—there was the brother who’d come home from Afghanistan a tortured mess. Haunted and hollow. Distant.
“I know you don’t like to talk about—”
“You don’t know anything about it, Kit.” He tossed—no, threw—his barely eaten apple at the trashcan already overflowing with garbage. It smacked off the top and rolled to the floor. “So just don’t.”
“Fine. We won’t talk about the war, but we have to talk about the orchard.” She stalked past him, picked up his apple, and pressed down on the pile of trash, not even caring about the grossness of it. She pulled up the edges of the trash bag and tried to heft it out. Too heavy. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if Beckett hadn’t been around.”
“You could’ve kept the place closed like I planned.” Lucas stepped around her and pulled the trash bag from her grasp. “You didn’t have to come charging in to save the day. I didn’t ask you to.” He yanked out the bag.
“I care about the orchard, even if you don’t.”
“Why?”
She stilled at the sincerity of his question, staring as Lucas twisted the garbage bag handles into a knot and tossed it outside the door. He really didn’t know, did he? “Because . . . because this is home. This is the place where we were happy. Don’t you remember? We were a family at least for a little while. You, me, Dad.”
Didn’t he remember that Indian summer? So many evenings picking apples with Dad and Grandma and Grandpa. Listening to Grandpa’s stories about growing up at the orchard, wooing Grandma right here in these fields. Sitting on the porch and eating Grandma’s apple pie and hearing about the mom she’d never had a chance to know.
And Dad. He’d been carefree and attentive and happy.
He’d been here.
“I remember Dad stuck around for a whole month, month and a half.” Derision edged Lucas’s words. “And then I remember him waltzing in one night and announcing he was heading back to Fort McNair and we’d be staying here with the grandparents. I remember hearing him and Grandpa arguing later that night. I remember you crying your eyes out for the next week.”
Yes. Because she’d honestly thought it would be different this time. That Dad would stay. How could it still sting now, the memory of him driving away?
In her youthful despair, she’d actually decided to run away, go back to Colorado, where they’d lived before with one of their aunts, Dad’s sister. Beckett—of course—had been the one to find her packing a suitcase. She could remember it so clearly, even now, in the wake of all that had happened in the past hour . . .
He’d told her she had to stay. Reminded her of all the fun they’d had in the past month. Told her they were best friends now, and best friends didn’t leave.
Even if fathers did. That’s what she’d thought to herself.
But then he’d pushed her suitcase out of the way and hopped onto her bed and launched into a story—of the Spaniards in 1519 who’d arrived in Mexico only to face so many hardships they wished to turn around and go back. Instead, in a show of iron will, they’d burned their ships, forcing themselves to stay and make a new life for themselves.
“You need to burn your ships, Kit Danby.”
Even at eleven years old, Beckett Walker had known exactly how to sway her. Just like he had this afternoon, charming her into a tree-climbing race.
Luke went on. “I remember Dad ditching us here. I remember thinking, ‘Why in the world can’t he take us with him when he’s got a desk job?’ I understood before, back when he was overseas. But he wasn’t overseas most of the time. He was working regular hours, living in a regular house. That’s what I remember.”
“It must have just been too painful, being around us.” She said it by rote, the same old shielding excuses shambling to the surface. “We must have reminded him of Mom. The hurt must have simply been too much.”
“Or it was just easier to walk away than man up to his responsibilities.”
She couldn’t stop her gasp—not at his statement itself, but the irony. Coming from a man who’d left his station in a desert and disappeared for nearly twenty-five unbearable months. Who’d refused to even defend himself during his court martial.
He must’ve heard it, too. Because his defiant stance deflated. Guilt seemed to press into him. “I’m going to go to the house.”
“Luke—”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have left the way I did. But I’m back now, and I’ve got a buyer.”
“What?” Vaguely, she was aware of the last customer leaving the store.
“I told Dad at the end of last season I didn’t think I wanted to keep this up. He said if I can find a buyer, I can have a slice of the sale revenue.”
She sputtered. “But . . . but he told me . . . he said I could have a season to make a profit and . . .”
Lucas stopped under the doorframe. “Probably because he gave up on me doing anything about it. Honestly, I don’t think he really cares what happens to this place. He’s got his life in D.C. He’ll give you some of the revenue, too, I’m sure.”
“I don’t want revenue.” This day, it was too much. Such heady excitement this morning and now . . .
She shouldn’t even be here. She should be with Beckett. “Luke, we can’t sell. Think of Grandma and Grandpa.”
“I’ve got a buyer, I’ve got the paperwork, I’ve got everything. It’s the owner of the orchard I worked at while I was in North Carolina. Dad just needs to sign.”
“He won’t—”
Lucas shook his head and turned his back to her. “He will.”
Brain tumor.
Beckett couldn’t wrap his mind around the doctor’s words. The intermittent hum and flicker of the overhead fluorescent light in Dad’s hospital room was more nettling than it should be. Just outside the door, a janitor clattered by with a rolling mop bucket, the heavy bleachy odor wafting into the room. And so much white—the walls, the bedsheets, the doctor’s jacket.
Dad’s face.
He was awake now. Alert, sitting up, but pale.
And apparently not at all surprised by Dr. McNabb’s string of jarring sentences. “I’m glad you’ve already been to Ames for the MRI. Got off the phone with the specialist there a few minutes ago. Sounds like you’re already set up for some additional tests in Iowa City?”
Additional tests?
Dad nodded. “Tuesday, actually.”
“Will he need surgery, Dr. McNabb?” Kate rose from the edge of Dad’s bed. It was the first she’d moved from the spot since a nurse had finally ushered them into the room.
“Honestly, I don’t know. That’s something testing and the neurosurgeon in Iowa City will determine. If it’s not cancerous—”
Beckett’s stomach turned inside out from where he sat in the room’s one chair, edged into the corner, out of the way.
“—then it’ll most likely depend on the location and size of the tumor, the severity of the symptoms. Brain surgery comes with risks, of course, and with some tumors, we have the option not to operate and simply keep an eye on it. Other times, surgery is vital.”
Why wasn’t anyone jumping in? His sisters and brother—they all just stood there by Dad’s bed, still and mute. As if Dr. McNabb was talking about flu symptoms and not something that could . . .
He inhaled so sharply it drew Dad’s gaze from the hospital bed. Calm. Reassuring.
Completely nonsensical.
“I’m sorry, Dr. McNabb, can we back up for a second?” Beckett stood so abruptly that the chair scraped the floor behind him. “So this isn’t new? You’ve known about this tumor?” Just saying the word clogged his throat.
The doctor looked from Beckett to Dad and back again. “Perhaps I should let you talk as a family for a bit.” He closed Dad’s chart and moved to the door. “Case, I think we’ll keep you overnight just to be on the safe side.”
Dad groaned. “That really necessary, Doc?”
“I promise to stop by before my shift ends and we can argue Iowa versus Iowa State. That way you won’t be completely bored.”
With that, the doctor left the room, the last of Beckett’s patience following him out. He raked his fingers through his hair, alarm pinching his voice. “Dad, you have a brain tumor?”
Not ten minutes ago, he’d been sitting out in the waiting room, half listening to Raegan and Kate’s whispered conversation about the hospital’s stale coffee and watching Logan bounce Charlie on his knee and assuming the doctor would be out any minute to tell them Dad simply needed to watch his cholesterol or blood pressure or something.
But this? The overhead light flickered again, its plastic panel and the ceiling tiles around it rattling as he grappled to understand. “You have a brain tumor and you already knew and you’re going in for more tests and might need surgery and you didn’t tell us?”
The darted words ricocheted into silence.
Not just silence. Something else. Unspoken but gradually becoming clear as his attention dragged from Dad to each of his siblings. Logan, Kate, Rae. Not a one of them appeared surprised or even half as shell-shocked as he felt.
They already knew.
It lanced through him. “You guys . . . you already . . .” Suddenly it made sense—Logan’s cryptic words last night and then again an hour ago as Dad’s stretcher had been loaded into the ambulance. He and Amelia hadn’t just come home because of the orchard opening.
Dad straightened against the pile of pillows behind him. “Beckett—”
He couldn’t help it, the jagged edge in his tone. “Dad has a tumor on his brain and you all knew.” Nausea twisted his stomach. Or maybe that was just hurt. Anger. Probably both.
“Can we have a few minutes, guys?”
At Dad’s request, his siblings shuffled toward the door. But he couldn’t look at them. Couldn’t look at Dad. Only stared at the glinting silver flecks in the laminate tile floor while that stupid light in the ceiling kept buzzing.
“Beck—”
“Seriously, how hard is it to change a bulb?” He dragged his chair to a spot underneath the light and climbed on it, reached over his head to smack the plastic covering with his palm. When the rattle didn’t stop, he hit it again. Waited.
Silence.
“Feel better?”
The sliver of amusement in Dad’s voice wasn’t nearly enough to quell the frustration building in him. And no, he didn’t feel better.
But he climbed off the chair anyway. Stood. Stiff and waiting.
“I’ve been having migraines for a couple months. Some dizziness. Couple weird vision issues.” Dad spoke calmly, evenly. “A few days before Seth’s wedding, I passed out in the kitchen.”
Beckett finally raised his gaze. Dad’s hands were folded in his lap, his posture slack against the pillows.
“Raegan found me, and I came to a lot quicker that time than today. But it was serious enough that I made a doctor’s appointment. Dr. McNabb referred me to the specialist in Ames, and I had the MRI about a week and a half ago.” A machine with numbers Beckett didn’t comprehend blinked beside Dad’s bed. “I found out it was a tumor last week, and now I’ll go to Iowa City for some more in-depth tests. Probably a PET scan, a spinal tap, couple other imaging tests.”
Dad’s explanation was a merry-go-round that wouldn’t stop spinning. All this had happened without Beckett noticing? That trip to Ames week before last—he hadn’t asked Dad what it was about, just assumed it was a regular old errand. The headaches—he hadn’t even thought to consider there was something serious going on.
He lowered into the chair, didn’t realize his hands were shaking until he tried to trace a rip in the vinyl armrest. “And it might be . . . ?” Cancer. He couldn’t make himself say the word.
Suddenly he was nineteen years old again, sitting on the couch in the living room at home with his siblings while the recliner by the fireplace swallowed Mom’s thin frame, Dad’s palms on her shoulders, telling them her cancer was back again.
And this time, there might not be any fighting it.
“There’s every reason to hope it’s not cancer. Brain tumors often turn out to be nonmalignant.” Dad shifted in the bed, pushing the cotton sheet away and swinging his legs over the edge. He leaned forward, coaxing Beckett’s gaze once more. “Right now, I just need you to know that I wasn’t trying to be hurtful in not telling you. I’ve been praying about the right timing to tell each of you. You had orchard thing today, which I knew was a big deal, and you’re flying to Boston on Labor Day—”
“I’m not. Not if your tests are Tuesday.”
“You are not going to miss your FSO interview because of this.”
“That’s the last thing I’m worried about at the moment.” He’d call the JAG officer. Reschedule. Whatever.
God, this isn’t happening. Not Dad, too.
Did hurled words tinged with resentment count as a prayer? Even if they did, what was the point? Hadn’t he prayed night after night for Mom?
Strangely, despite the unanswered prayer, he’d never stopped believing God was there. Just that he listened. Because despite what he’d always heard in Sunday school, there had to be a point where God moved on from the screw-ups. Gave his attention to the people more likely to get it right.
Beckett scraped his palm over his cheeks and chin. “Will they be able to know if it’s cancer or not without surgery?”
“Maybe not definitively. It’s like Dr. McNabb said, a lot is going to depend on the rest of the tests.” Dad rose to his feet, but not without wobbling. He closed his eyes, gripped the railing along the edge of the bed.
And everything in Beckett told him to reach out, grasp Dad’s arm, help steady him.
But he couldn’t move. He just sat there, feet cemented to the overly shiny floor as his world tilted. In all his uncertainties in all the years since Mom’s death, he’d always had one assurance—Dad. When he’d escaped to Boston and let the gulf between his new life and his home and family span wider and wider, there’d always been the surety of Dad’s presence, even if from afar. Even if their relationship bore the strain of distance.
And not just geographic distance. There were things he’d never said to Dad about the day Mom died. Guarded emotion he’d refused to free, to even face. Even so, Dad had still been . . . Dad. Strong, always there, always waiting.
Now two words had thrown his entire world off-kilter. Brain tumor.
Slowly, Dad lowered himself back onto the bed. But there was a firmness in his eyes as he leveled with Beckett. “We’re not going to panic about this, son. We’re going to trust God. We’re going to—”
The scoff was out before he could stop it, and he hated it. Hated the look on Dad’s face. Hated that he couldn’t handle this with any kind of even-keeled maturity. Hated the knots twisting inside that drove him to his feet and threatened to drive him from the room.
Not just threatened. “Dad, I’m sorry, I can’t . . .” His legs moved of their own accord. “I can’t do this right now.”
And then he was escaping through the door and down the hospital corridor, past the nurse’s station, and around the corner that led into the waiting room. His siblings sat in the same chairs as before, drinking from the same Styrofoam cups, the same drone from the same TV in the corner filling their silence. Logan’s wife held a sleeping Charlie.
“Beck.”
He pretended not to hear Logan, intent on the revolving door, its blaring red exit sign beckoning. In his periphery, he was aware of Raegan standing, Kate already moving toward him.
He ignored them all and simply kept moving.
Forty-four. Forty-five. Forty-six.
Beckett lobbed the basketball at the garage door in a rhythm that matched his throbbing head. Every bounce rattled against the night’s quiet as the ball first hit the garage then the cement, then slapped into Beckett’s hands.
Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.
“I thought the goal was to get it through the hoop.”
Fifty. The ball met his palms, and he trapped it. Logan’s wife, Amelia, stood on the porch steps, hands buried in the pockets of her denim jacket and hair pulled away from her face. She and Logan had arrived home from the hospital half an hour ago, Logan carrying a sleeping Charlie.
Kate and Raegan were still with Dad.
A gust of early-September cool clattered through the wind chimes hanging from the corner of the porch and scuffed over Beckett’s cheeks, his bare arms. The opaque night dimmed the rustic wood frame of Dad’s house.
“Guess I’m tired. Making a basket feels like too much effort.” Easier, apparently, to take out his frustration on the garage door.
Amelia descended the porch steps and strolled to the driveway, coming to a stop just in front of him. “I’ve been meaning to thank you.”
He peered down at her, this woman who’d embedded herself in his brother’s and niece’s lives. How long had they been married now? Two months? He’d had only a handful of conversations with her. “Thank me? For what?”
“Logan told me you went out to see him in LA. Earlier this year, I mean. Everything sort of fell apart between us at the end of spring, and he went back to LA and I got the job offer in Chicago.” Her hands were still in her pockets, but they moved as she spoke. “Apparently you went out to see him and I don’t know what you said, but it must have been good. Because next thing I know, he’s following me to Chicago.”
And then eloping with her only a few weeks later.
Feathery clouds shifted and separated long enough to release a shaft of moonlight. It highlighted the faraway glint in Amelia’s eyes. Dreamy, that was the word for her expression. Head over heels and all that.
It was true he’d gone out to LA a few months ago—mostly because his sisters had called him and asked him to. No way he could’ve said no to that. Other than Kit, it was rare he was the one anyone turned to for help. He so often felt on the fringes of his family. “I don’t think I said anything so brilliant.”
She pulled her gaze away from whatever romantic memory it’d settled on a moment ago and instead peered at him. He heard a window sliding shut—probably Logan, making sure Charlie would stay warm tonight—and the distant hoo of an owl in the ravine that curved around the back of Dad’s property and up along the side. Some nights, if he squinted just right, he could see the lights of Kit’s grandparents’ house blinking through the knot of trees.
“He hated not telling you, you know.”
His attention snapped back to Amelia.
“I was there when Case called a few days ago. Logan hasn’t taken the news well. He’s had trouble sleeping. I think it’s bringing back lots of memories of your mom. And I know it killed him not to be able to talk to you about it.”
He loosened his hold on the basketball, let it dribble to the cement. “But Dad asked him not to say anything and he’s Logan, so of course he did the right thing and didn’t.” He loathed how harsh it came out, the undercurrent of something long-standing and far too familiar layering his words.
Bitterness. Or maybe something even uglier.
Jealousy?
He loved Logan, of course he did. Looked up to him almost as much as Dad. It was just hard sometimes not to compare himself. Logan did the calm, even-keeled thing so well, whereas Beckett was the hothead with the tendency to fight or run away or too often both.
Amelia bent over to pick up the basketball, skirted past Beckett, and eyed the hoop. “I’m so un-sporty, it’s not even funny.”
“Par for the course around here. I’m the only Walker who ever did the athletic thing. Kate tried a throw a Frisbee once when we were kids—knocked out one of my front teeth.” Funny, considering she was now dating a former quarterback. Hadn’t been so funny when he was a five-year-old with a bleeding mouth.
Amelia tossed the ball toward the hoop. Missed by a mile. Okay, so she wasn’t joking. She laughed and turned back to him. “Told ya.”
He shrugged. “Everybody’s shot an air ball once or twice.”
“Yep. Everybody.” She studied him again. “If I tell you something, can you promise not to tell Logan I told you?” He lifted his eyebrows, and she apparently took it as a promise. “Last spring when Logan was home, he had some problems with Emma’s folks.”
His first wife’s parents? Hadn’t the O’Hares adored him? Acted like Emma was marrying a prince? “What kind of problems?”
Amelia glanced upward, toward the bedroom window that had belonged to Logan as a kid. The one he and Amelia and Charlie were sharing during their stay. “Had to do with Charlie. Logan was a wreck over it. And this is the part he’d kill me for telling you. He and Rick O’Hare got into it right in the middle of the town square.”
“As in, an argument?”
“As in, Logan punched the guy. I wasn’t there, but believe me, I heard about it.”
“You’re telling me, my brother—calm, cool, always-do-the-right-thing Logan Walker—lost his temper and decked a dude in front of a bunch of people.” How he could even find a grin under the grime of this day was beyond him. “You’re telling me this because . . . ?”
“Because it seems like maybe you could use something to cheer you up a little tonight.” She gave him a sisterly pat on the arm. “And because I’m not sure the garage door can take much more.”
He kind of liked her, this woman his brother had brought into the family. “You know, I really do feel a little better.”
She squeezed his arm before starting for the front door. “Just don’t stay angry at him and the girls forever, okay?” She waited long enough for him to nod, then retreated into the house.
Beckett didn’t move from his spot on the cement. He tipped his head, stretching the muscles in his neck and back and shoulders as a draught of chilled air flapped his gym shorts against his legs. Stars blinked sluggishly overhead, as if trying to stay awake under the cotton cover of wispy clouds.
His gaze alighted on his own bedroom window on the side of the house, the wraparound porch roof . . .
“You’re thinking about heading up and climbing out your window, aren’t you?”
Something released in him as he turned. “Kit.” She must have walked over, crossed the ravine, and come around the house. How had he not heard her? She stood in the yard, rescued basketball in her arm.
“Don’t you ever get worried sometime you’ll fall completely asleep up there, roll over in the middle of the night, and topple right off the roof?”
“Probably wouldn’t break any bones if I did. I’d land in the rosebushes.” They met under the basketball hoop.
She dropped the ball to the grass. “Yeah, but then you’re talking thorns and your father’s wrath at the sight of your mom’s ruined flowers.”
His muddled brain didn’t know which of her words to latch onto; his tumbling emotion, which feeling to fall into. Worry at the mention of Dad. The familiar pang at the mention of Mom.
Or the talk of flowers and the scent of Kit’s lotion or perfume or something and the awareness of how close she stood and how much he’d wished her here without even realizing it.
“I tried calling.” Her voice was as soft as the gentleness in her eyes. “I went to the hospital but you were already gone, and then I came here but you weren’t home yet.”
“I went for a run.” Literally and figuratively. “Needed to blow off steam.”
“Well, you’ve got a slew of anxious texts and voicemails waiting for you.”
“I honestly don’t even know where my phone is.”
“It’s okay. I got ahold of Kate. She told me everything. I—”
He didn’t wait for whatever she was going to say next. Only reached for her like a lifeline. He felt the surprise sway through her as he wound his arms around her back.
But then she leaned into him, her arms wrapping around him just as tightly as he held her.
A minute might have passed—or five or ten, he didn’t know—before his hold loosened. But he didn’t pull away, nor did Kit step back. “Did I see Lucas at the orchard?”
She only nodded against his chest, perhaps as un-ready to talk about her own life upheaval as he was his.
“They all knew, Kit.”
She tipped her head back, meeting his eyes, and he saw the understanding there. He didn’t even have to voice it—how standing in that hospital room, realizing everyone else in the family knew about Dad’s diagnosis, had sent him back to the day of Mom’s death.
Arriving home to find out he was too late. To hear about how they’d all gathered at her bedside, one by one said their goodbyes.
A shared moment he’d never be able to claim as a memory of his own.
Why hadn’t they told him to come home? He’d called, he’d talked to Dad. He’d asked if he should skip his basketball game. Oh, some logical piece of his brain tried to remind him there’s no way they could’ve known. The doctor had said Mom still had weeks. Dad had no idea that morning when he told Beckett there was no need to miss his game that later that day everything would change.
But logic could never quite hush the stormy force of his emotion. It’d blustered in all over again at the hospital today, an unstoppable zephyr. Half hurt, half anger. Would he never stop carrying this around?
And how could he possibly be irate toward Dad considering his current condition?
Kit reached up to smooth a windswept piece of hair over his forehead. Her fingers lingered there, sliding down his cheek until she cupped his face with one hand. “Want to play a little one-on-one?”
He nodded against her palm.
She dropped her hand and stepped away. He fought the urge to pull her back, reaching instead for the ball. Kit pulled a hair tie from her pocket and bunched up her hair. After she tightened her ponytail, he lobbed the ball to her and she moved to the crack in the cement they’d always used as a court line.
Instead of moving, though, she paused after a lone dribble. “Beck, today . . . before everything, I found . . .”
“Yeah?”
But she only shook her head. “Nothing.” She seemed to force a smile, a tease. “Just don’t go letting me win.”
He found a grin of his own. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”