“Maple, leave Daddy alone,” Willow laughs.
“What the fuck?” Beck snorts, barging in on us. “Dude, I thought yoga was supposed to be hard.”
I haul myself up on one elbow. “Wait ’til you try it.”
“Not gonna happen. You need help getting up, old fart?” He extends his hand, but I’m not falling for that trap again.
I roll onto my knees and stand up, feeling—I hate to admit—marginally better each day. “I’ll be right there,” I say.
Griff is waiting for us outside, and we don’t have far to go. Everything is ready on the store’s loading dock. We just need to make sure Willow won’t walk in on us, so we sit outside on the dock, sipping coffee and eating fresh apple cider doughnuts delivered by Kiara an hour ago.
“Good shit,” Griff comments, raising his cup of coffee.
“Willow’s idea,” I say proudly.
“You don’t say,” he teases.
“Fuck off,” I answer with a chuckle.
“Dude, what if she doesn’t like it?” Beck asks.
“Shut up,” I say. “She’s gonna love it.”Right?
“Yeah, she’ll get used to it,” Griff says.
I chuckle. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I can’t believe my brothers are throwing this shit at me now, but at the same time, I’ve missed that kind of ribbing.
Though to be honest, did we really ever have that?
A comfortable silence stretches between us, one that I want to commit to memory. The fact that they’re here for me right now means so much to me, and I need to tell them. “I need to put this out there,” I say. They both look at me. “I’ve been sort of a dick to you guys, more often than not.”
Griff shrugs and takes a sip of coffee, looking in the distance.
“Dude, come on,” Beck says uneasily.
I turn to my youngest brother and don’t see the troubled kid who kept me up at night. I don’t see the shouting matches or the shameful trips to the police station. I don’t see his face bloodied by some fight he decided to pick at The Growler. Instead I see a man who fought his pain the only way he knew.
“I should have been more understanding. Yelling at you didn’t help.”
Griff huffs. “Course it did. The little shit would have ended up in jail for more than one night if you hadn’t done anything. It’s not like Dad cared.”
“Dad cared,” I snap at Griff. I want to tell him he doesn’t know how much pain our father was in—he didn’t see it. I want to tell him it was the second time Dad lost a wife, but I don’t want to lord over him that I was there the first time and he wasn’t, or that the second time he was too young to understand. I’m trying to get us to the other side of that.
I need to break the caretaker role.
I need them to be mybrothers.
“He cared,” I repeat, softer. “He… he was just too messed up for the day-to-day.” And that’s why I had to step in. “That’s all it ever was.”
Griff sniffs and Beck clears his throat, but neither say anything.
“I took my role as the oldest too seriously, and…” I take a deep breath. Why is it so hard to say the simplest things? “It came between us. And no one is sorrier than I am. Griff, I’m sorry you no longer felt like you had a place here in Emerald Creek. And Beck, I’m sorry you feel like you always need to run things by me. You don’t. We’re equals.”
Beck slaps my back. “Yeah, you’re the only one who still thinks I need to run things by you, Noah. Glad you’re seeing the light.”
I shove him playfully. I’ve reached the limit of what Beck can handle in terms of an emotional moment, and I get it. “I’ll get acall in with Tamberly to talk about restructuring all this. Legally. So nobody feels they need to ask for my permission.”
After a few beats of silence settle between us, Griff rubs his beard. “Speaking of, we talked to—what’s the shithead’s name again?”
