Owen: Anyone free to listen to their older brother talk about his feelings?
Seth was the first to reply.
Seth: You jerk, you had to have a crisis while I’m running supplies? I can be home next week. You better still have feelings when I get there.
Owen: Pretty sure this is a chronic condition now.
Seth: Excellent.
Will: Didn’t I just see you twenty minutes ago? What happened after I left the armouries?
Owen: You left already?
Will: I have to prep for a staff meeting tomorrow.
Owen: …
Will: You don’t listen to me anyway.
Owen: That’s not true. But I’ll wait and see if Adam and Josh are free—and then I’m coming to you, because I need your help specifically.
Neither Adam nor Josh replied immediately, so Owen decided to head home. By the time he pulled into his driveway, they’d both chimed in.
Adam: I was at the armouries but missed you. Let me know where to meet up.
Josh: My place. I just put a basketball hoop in behind the garage.
Basketball? It was consistently below freezing every day now. Slightly off-season. Owen went inside and changed out of his army uniform, and re-dressed for shooting hoops in the winter.
Then he went digging in the crawl space for another box he hadn’t looked at in years. Once he had what he needed, he drove to the garage.
In the time Josh had been back, he’d made huge progress on the building. The boarded-up front window was now replaced with a brand new pane of glass. It had a newly whitewashed façade, andKincaid’s Garagewas outlined in paint on the wall. Owen liked that even more than thePine Harbour Garagehis brother had been considering.
And the garage doors were now apple red.
The whole thing looked retro, and hipster, and very much a success before it had even opened.
He walked around the side, following the sound of rubber slapping against concrete, then a backboard.Bounce, bounce, bounce, thwack.Behind the garage was a parking lot—although right now, it was a big, echoey, private basketball court.
“The net is an integral part of the renovations, eh?” Owen called out.
Josh caught the ball and spun it on his finger as he glanced over his shoulder. “Gotta burn off some steam as the paint dries. I didn’t know that you’d want to call around for tea.”
Owen snorted. “This won’t be nearly that polite.”
“What’s going on?”
He glanced around.
Josh swung his arm wide. “There’s nobody here.”
Fuck. Owen’s courage had fallen out of the truck somewhere on the hill down to the harbour. “I’m not sure where to start.”
The fond smile on his brother’s face helped. So did the way he slung the ball under his arm and gestured to an old bench against the wall—and the cooler underneath it. “Want a beer?”
“Hell yes.”
It took Owen half a beer and a good amount of sorting through his thoughts before he could begin. At first, the story came out in fits and starts, but once he got going, it poured out.
