“B, that necklace thing—” I pause, looking between my brother and his colleague. “It’s still on my bike.”
“We’ll get him,” he assures me with a hand on my shoulder. “I promise that you won’t go home without him.”
Neither of us make much effort for conversation while we collect my stuff. I can’t get a read on if he’s pissed at me for what I did, or if he just doesn’t like coming to Florida. Either way, his brows have a soft pinch to them that makes me not want to ask him any questions.
He softens, just a little, when we’re finally on our way out of the building and heading for his rental car.
“Shitty car,” I comment, gesturing toward the small silver sedan waiting for us.
“My brother was in lockup,” Brody snarks. “You’ll forgive me for not taking the time to reserve a Range Rover.”
The corner of my mouth ticks up with a soft laugh as his hand clamps down on the back of my neck.
Much to his displeasure, I take five minutes to have a cigarette before stuffing the pack into my pocket and sliding into the passenger’s seat. Pulling the small bullet-shaped pendant from my left pocket, I wrap the chain around my finger, giving a squeeze to the cool metal and the ashes kept inside of it.
Clearing my throat as Brody pulls us out of the parking space, I ask him, “Can I fly back with you?”
“I already discussed it with Nia,” he says. “Your room is set up and waiting for you.”
I sit quietly for a moment, tapping my heel against the floor of the car while I look out the window and into the parking lot.It’s not as busy as I would expect it to be, filled with mostly patrol cars and a few cruisers with maybe five civilian vehicles sprinkled throughout.
Pulling the lever at the side of my seat, I dip into a low recline and cross my arms over my chest.
“This is where I’m supposed to file papers, right?” I finally ask, keeping my eyes trained on the window as we leave the lot.
My brother heaves a sigh, rolling his knuckles against the steering wheel before glancing in my direction.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Tripp,” he tells me. “All I can do is tell you that our home is open to you for however long you need it.”
Yeah.
His home, right back in the belly of the fucking beast.
I don’t talk on the way back to the house. I just watch. The trees, the buildings, the familiar Miami architecture as all of it flies past me. When we reach a line of houses, one right after the other that look exactly like mine, my stomach churns.
I pull in a breath, closing my eyes as we roll to a stop on my driveway, where my wife’s SUV is parked.
We didn’t want to live in an HOA. We’d both spent so long being told what to do, how to act, who to be; we didn’t need some stuffy old crones bossing us around, too.
Turns out, you don’t get much choice in where you wind up when you show up with less than a week’s notice and a tight budget after your parents cut you off from the family bank accounts.
Jules was determined to make it work for us.‘It may not be our dream home, but we can turn our home into our dream,’she’d told me, and she tried to do just that. From fresh coats of paint in the interior to re-finishing our thrifted furniture pieces to give them a face lift.
Everything about being here feels wrong, now.
This isn’t the home that we made together.
It’s just another one that I’ve lost.
“Oh my god, where were you?” Julia calls from the kitchen as we step through the front door. As she rounds the corner, horror washes over her features. “Did you wreck? Are you okay? What happened to your face?”
“You—”
Brody’s hand presses firmly between my shoulder blades as if I’m one of his clients being led out of the court room, and he leans in to tell me, “Don’t do or say anything that you’ll regret in the morning.”
Would I regret it, though?
We made vows to each other. We devoted the rest of our lives to each other, and when we promised to stay faithful to each other, I took that seriously. I assumed that she did, too.
