I gave the front door a good kick. Warmer weather always made the front door of my father’s house stick. I hadn’t been back here since that morning I’d found him. Even in death, Jonah Bodine Sr. hadn’t looked peaceful.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside. My childhood home was a bungalow. The yellow siding had always struck me as too cheerful for the family that lived within its walls. Especially after Mama died.

I dropped the keys on the skinny table Gibson had made in his high school shop class. Dad’s keys were there too. Dropped there the afternoon before he died. I’d muscled him into the house. He’d snuck a flask along to a job site, and I’d had to bring him home early before the clients saw him shit-faced on the job. I remembered tossing his keys on the table one last time.

It was stuffy and dark inside, reminding me that this was now an empty house. There was no more life in the Bodine bungalow. The blinds had been drawn the night Daddy died and remained closed since then. I’d been avoiding this place and the memories just like my brothers. But I was the only one of us who had the memory of him dead in his bed.

I turned into the long skinny living room on the left. Everything here was exactly the same as it always had been. A saggy plaid couch. The recliner that didn’t recline quite right. The flat screen TV I’d bought dad two years ago when his rabbit-eared dinosaur had finally called it quits. I’d mounted it above the fireplace for him with the sad hope that having something nice would make him want to make an effort in other areas of his life.

My father had taught me a lot of things. He’d shown me how to use every tool known to man to fix just about every problem created by man. But he’d also taught me that no matter how much I hoped or prayed or tried, I couldn’t control other people. I couldn’t make them make the choices I wanted them to. I couldn’t drag them into health and happiness.

It was a painful, essential lesson.

With a sigh, I set about opening the blinds and windows in the long room. Maybe some fresh June air would sweep out some of those memories that haunted us all.

One by one, I worked my way around the room, opening them before moving on to the eat-in kitchen on the opposite side of the house and doing the same. The first floor was divided in half by the stairs to the second floor. I tried to look at the house objectively, like a new project for which history didn’t matter.

I’d always wanted to expand the kitchen into the useless breakfast nook. Now I could.

I skipped Daddy’s bedroom in the back of the house. I wasn’t ready to revisit that room. Not with its most recent memories.

Growing up, it had been mine. The only one on the first floor. There were three small rooms upstairs. When I’d moved out at nineteen, I’d moved Daddy to the first floor since his drinking made him unsteady on his feet.

I looked around trying to decide where to begin.

Overwhelmed, I sat down on the first step of the staircase. It still squeaked as it had for fifteen years. We’d all learned to skip that step when it would have been faster and smarter to just fix the damn thing.

I sighed out a long breath. Jonah, bless his big heart, had offered to come help me today. But it wasn’t exactly fair to him, asking him to clean out the home of the father who’d abandoned him.

So, it fell to me. I put my face in my hands and allowed myself a moment of pathetic self-pity. What did I really have to be upset about? I, Scarlett Bodine, age 26, had my very first official boyfriend. We’d sealed the deal last night with baked potato and pie and some vigorous, acrobatic sex on my porch swing. At least until the chain had snapped and we’d fallen in a heap to the floor.

Totally worth the bruises.

In the grand scheme of things, having to tackle my father’s house alone was an emotional inconvenience, but my good stuff outweighed the bad. Now, if I could just get up the gumption to start…

The crunch of tires on gravel out front had me lifting my head.

Had one of my brothers felt guilty enough about dumping this on me that they—

It wasn’t a Bodine climbing up the porch steps. It was Devlin. And I wanted to cry.

“Hey, I thought I’d see if you needed a hand—”

The velocity of my body colliding with his cut him off. He was here to help me clean up a mess that wasn’t his because he cared. I clung to him like Virginia creeper. Gratitude made my eyes sting.

“Thank you,” I whispered against his t-shirt. He held me close and stroked a hand down my ponytail. I breathed him in, stealing a bit of his strength, and then unwound myself from him.

He was watching me with a soft look on his face. “Do you think you could greet me like that every time you see me for a while?” he asked.

“Yeah. I think I could do that,” I said softly. I stepped back and let him inside. “Welcome to Bodine Bungalow.”

Devlin glanced around, and I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of home he’d grown up in. I’d be willing to bet it was a bit grander than my own childhood home.

“It’s nice,” he said. “Cozy. I bet there are a lot of memories here.”

There were. Enough bad memories to be haunted by and enough good ones to make the loss still hurt.

“Yeah. Lots of memories,” I agreed, my throat tight.

“Where do you want me to start?” he asked. “You have me for the day. I’ve got cleaning supplies in the car, garbage bags, a couple of plastic totes. I have a scanner back at Gran’s if there’s any paperwork you want to save.”

My eyes started to water. It was the dust, I told myself. Not the freely offered help.

“Let’s start with the fridge. That’ll be the worst of it. Then, we can look for any paperwork and photo albums. Things I want to keep,” I decided.

He nodded. “I’ll grab the supplies.”

I watched him walk back down the porch steps—the same steps that I’d bounded down in a bid to run away from home twice in my teens—and fell just a little, tiny bit in love with Devlin McCallister.

* * *

Devlin hadn’t said a word when we’d cleared the dozen empty bottles of cheap Kentucky bourbon from the kitchen cabinets. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that the refrigerator was empty except for beer and moonshine and a really old jar of mayonnaise. And he hadn’t raised an eyebrow when I’d opened each and every bottle and dumped it all straight down the drain.

He was too polite to ask any questions. He knew the basics. But I was tired of not saying anything, tired of accepting.

“My father was an alcoholic,” I announced as we carted two waste baskets of recyclables out onto the front porch.

“Okay,” Devlin said.

“He always drank, but it got worse after my mom died,” I continued.

“How old were you when she died?” Devlin asked.

“I was fifteen. Car accident.”

His hand settled on my shoulder, and I stopped my fidgeting. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

“She was a good mom, mostly.” It was important to me that he believed me. “She and my dad got pregnant in high school and married. In some ways, they never grew up. They fought a lot. There was a lot of jealousy. And obviously at least one of them wasn’t faithful. Daddy drank too much. Mama didn’t handle it well. And they raised four basket cases.”

Devlin leaned in close and cupped my cheek in his hand. “Baby. Nothing about you says basket case.”

I closed my eyes, relaxing into his soothing touch.

“I started going to work with my daddy in the summers at twelve because Mama thought he was drinking on the job. He was. By thirteen, I was driving his ass home. By fifteen, I was doing most of the work.”

Devlin towed me into him, wrapping his arms around me, creating a safe, warm space. “Gibson hates him. Daddy never kept it quiet that Gibs was the reason he and Mama got married. Bowie is the good guy trying to undo all the bad that Daddy did. Jameson just kept his head down and tried to live his own life outside of the drama.”

“And your mother?” Devlin asked.

“She hung in there for us. She didn’t know what happiness was. But she knew what was right and wrong. Made me make that promise not to get married before thirty and made my brothers promise not to get married for any reason other than stupid in love.”

“Did he ever hurt you?” Devlin asked.

I leaned back and looked up into those stormy eyes. “Daddy? No! Of course not. At least not physically.”

He relaxed his hold on me.

“If not physically, then how?”

I shrugged and pressed my cheek against his chest. It was my new favorite place to be. “I just wanted to be important enough to him that he didn’t need to drink,” I confessed.

“Baby.”

Devlin said it so softly, so sweetly.

“I know. I know that he was an alcoholic, and I know you can’t just matter enough to someone to make them quit. But I really, really wanted to,” I told him.

Again, he ran his hand through the tail of my hair.

“I can’t remember a time growing up that I wasn’t worried about Mama and Daddy gettin’ a divorce. Looking back, I don’t know why they didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like they were happy.”

“Maybe they felt like it was the right thing to do,” Devlin offered gruffly.

“But the right thing shouldn’t be so unhappy. Should it?” I asked.

“Easy doesn’t mean right,” Devlin pointed out.

I sighed. “There was a time—right after Callie disappeared—that things were good. Everyone was trying. Even Gibson,” I recalled. “I think it scared everyone and made them want to hold on to what we’re all lucky enough to have.”

“But it didn’t last?” Devlin asked.

I shook my head. “Never does, I guess.” I looked into the front yard at the trees I used to climb as a kid, pretending I was in the jungle far, far away. “Anyway, thanks for listening.”

Devlin leaned in and stroked his thumb across my cheek. “Scarlett, anything that’s important to you is important to me.”

God help me, I believed him.

My sigh this time was one of relief. “Thanks, Dev. How do you feel about snooping for important papers?”

He grinned. “I feel pretty damn good about that.”