Because, yeah. Mick trusted Ernest Harper about as far as he could’ve thrown his father, whom he also had learned, the hard way, to never, ever,evertrust.
Forget Yelp reviews and internet searches. Hollywood was a very connected community. He’d use those connections to find and hire the best team of private investigators in the Los Angeles area, they’d handle this quickly and easily, and Milt Devonshire Junior could finally vanish for good.
And maybe, just maybe, his fucking father wasn’t going to fuck him over one final fucking time.
Boston, Massachusetts
Sam sat at the table in the dining area just off the kitchen of Jules’s and Robin’s South End Boston townhouse.
The past few months had been brutally hard for his friends.
But it hadn't started out that way.
In fact, just a few short months ago, their lives had been filled with exciting new changes.
The Emmy-award-winning TV series in which Robin was the Emmy-award-winning star—filmed in nearby Jamaica Plain—had finally ended, and the two men made the choice to move to DC where Jules would once again be on track to become head of the most highly regarded counterterrorism unit in the FBI.
Their hope was to have a baby—Robin wanted a kid badly enough to take a break from his acting career. They’d found a surrogate to help them and...
Their good luck was off the charts again and again. The in vitro process worked on the first miraculous try, everything was going swimmingly well, the future was shining as brightly as a perfect beach day.
Until the shit hit the fan almost all at once.
The surrogate—a sunny, upbeat woman named Penny who had become close friends with all of them, not just the giddily expectant dads—was visiting her parents in Texas when sudden pain and bleeding brought her to the local ER. Things went downhill fast. The new life she was carrying had terminated—life worked in mysterious ways. Miscarriages, even at this late stage, were not all that uncommon. Butbecause Sam’s beloved Texas had turned into a simmering shithole of danger and death for women of child-bearing years, Penny was unable to get the care she needed to save her own life.
By the time she flew to a state that would treat her like a human being, she was desperately ill. After weeks in the ICU, she’d survived, but her body was irrevocably damaged and she’d never have a baby again. Not as a surrogate and not for herself. The tragedy had been unbearable—and entirely preventable.
Jules and Robin not only lost their desperately wanted baby daughter, they also lost a dear friend. Penny had gone so far as to leave the country. And even though Jules and Robin both had been ready to follow—to support her, to try to help her however they could, she’d instead asked for privacy and had completely cut ties, vanishing completely from their lives.
It was at this exact same time that America voted for a political party who hated the FBI and gave pardons to the criminals who’d assaulted and killed police officers protecting the Capital. A political party that was actively trying to erase trans Americans and who clearly had their eye on the rest of the LGBTQ+ community, too.
How did that famous book start? It was the worst of times, it was the fucking godawful worst of times...
And yet Sam knew that Jules—his dearest friend and most-trusted contact in the FBI for so many years—believed, like Sam did, that from chaos, came opportunity. They both also subscribed to Churchill’s famous words, from back when the world was fighting the original Nazis:Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force;never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Never surrender.
The look on Jules’s face now, as he sat quietly with Sam at this table amidst the half-eaten remains of the lunch they’d had delivered from their favorite local Italian place, was a sure sign that he was still haunted by his resignation.
But his quitting wasn’t surrender.
It wasn’t.
Because Jules sure as hell was going to keep fighting. He was just going to do it a little bit differently now, as the hands-on head of the Troubleshooters Los Angeles office.
Sam broke the silence they’d fallen into after Alyssa had gone upstairs to email their office manager Tracy to get her started on a revised draft of Jules’s new contract with TS, Inc.
Robin, too, had known with his extremely astute ability to read a room, that his beloved husband needed some space to continue to absorb this huge change to their lives. He’d made some excuse about needing to look at some scripts that his agent had just sent over and he’d vanished into the townhouse’s front office.
“Ah, thereisone thing I forgot to mention that we’re gonna need from you,” Sam said now, and Jules moved his thousand-mile stare from the remains of Lys’s chicken carciofi up to Sam’s face, a dimmer version of the usual light that danced in his eyes clicking on as he forced himself to pay attention and even tried to smile a little.
“We’re gonna need you to give us a loyalty oath,” Sam said—and the look of surprise that quickly morphed into over-the-top outraged disbelief on Jules’s face made him laugh.
Jules exhaled his disgust—a sound that covered what really was a laugh, too. Progress! “Too soon,” he said.
“Is it?” Sam asked.
And now Jules laughed for real. “Fuck you. Yes.”
