“Where the hell is Dad?” Daniel sighed, tossing his phone onto the table as he threw his arms to either side of him.
“Forget Dad, I wanna know how she managed to land one on you,” Liam grinned at Kilian.
Kilian resisted the urge to sigh, merely lifted a brow, doing his best to appear bored, “What’s it matter to you?”
Daniel’s eyes shifted between his brothers; a wry smile tucked his lips into the side of his face. A dimple formed in the middle of his cheek. “Someone’s awfully defensive this morning.”
Daniel’s jovial tone irritated Kilian.
He inhaled slowly, steadying the beating in his chest as its pace began to quicken. He needed to show his father that he could keep a cool head, but it was hard with both of his brothers poking and prodding at him so early in the morning.
“I’m not,” Kilian deflected, avoiding looking at either of his brothers by focusing on spinning the black band around his finger instead.
“Now, I’m not surprised you got into a bar fight, but how big was she?” Liam continued to tease as he stripped off his blazer and folded it neatly beside him.
“Not that big,” Daniel said over a mouthful of bread.
Kilian closed his eyes. His brothers had always reminded him of curious dogs—especially Liam—unable to let things go, especially if it meant embarrassing him.
Without lowering either of his arms from the top of the booth, Kilian challenged his brother’s look with one of his own. Liam didn’t look threatened, a crooked smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth as his pointed teeth peeked out from behind his lips.
“What’s it to you? Didn’t you always say size didn’t matter? Or were you saying that to make yourself feel better?”
Liam choked out a laugh before shaking his head in disbelief, “She was a tiny thing, wasn’t she?” A knowing smile slid over Liam’s face. “And your knuckles aren’t even red…? Did you even try to defend yourself?” He posed his question as he lifted his drink to his mouth, his eyebrows arching high, “How curious,” he said upon swallowing.
Kilian kept his eyes on the table— he promised himself he wouldn’t be bothered by the taunts, especially among brothers. However, Liam knew just what buttons to push, the gift of older brothers. Even as an adult, he somehow managed to torment.
Kilian’s fingers twitched as he fought the urge to ball his hand into a fist, knowing it’d be used in another joke if he dared to raise it, though it wouldn’t be the first time he’d struck Liam.
Grinding his teeth together painfully, Kilian opened his mouth to argue, but the comeback died in his mouth as a large figure stepped in front of table.
“Hello, boys,” his father said in his low, honey-toned voice. For such an intimidatingly-large man—he stood well above the booth, towering over each of his sons even now—his father had always had a voice that put Kilian at ease. Part of him supposed this could be explained by some kind of childhood significance, but he knew it was beyond that. His face was round, reddened at the tops of his cheeks and the center of his forehead—a particular redness pattern that Kilian had seen many times before, especially around the holidays.
The warm smell of freshly-baked pastries followed his father’s figure, delayed only by a fraction of a second, telling Kilian his father had sweet-talked Sophie into a free snack.
“Morning,” Daniel said with his trademark smirk on his face. He tucked his phone away into his pocket, retrieving it from the center of the table. “Whatcha got in that basket, Dad?”
Their father’s eyes turned to Daniel’s face, a wistful smile perking up the sides of his mouth as he lifted a large, wicker basket onto the table.
The basket took up the majority of the table, almost booting Daniel’s glass of water off as it settled onto the surface. Gentle lines of steam rose out from underneath the quilted towel that obscured the contents of the basket.
“These, my dear boy,” he leaned over the table to reveal Sophie’s creation. Pulling back the towel, he revealed more than a dozen, perfectly shaped muffins. Kilian observed them with a quick scan, determining that the small dots of color among the wheat-colored batter were dark blueberries.
As his brothers leaned in to procure their muffins, Kilian’s eyes drifted back to the man standing in front of their booth. Underneath the direct lamp light, Kilian’s father looked more aged than he had before. The dark wrinkles of his face looked more pronounced and, in turn, deepened the purple hue to the dark circles that lined the undersides of his eyes. As he moved, Kilian noticed that he was short of breath, his mouth falling open to swallow mouthfuls of the air to make up for his struggling.
He lowered himself down next to Daniel gently, releasing a deep groan as he supported himself by placing one of his hands on his knees.
As their father prepared his own brunch—smoothing a generous amount of butter onto the warm top of the blueberry muffin and pouring a cup of rich coffee—the boys waited. None of them moved to pick apart the muffins in front of them, instead they waited for their father to take his first bite. Kilian couldn’t remember when the tradition had started exactly, but it was something that each of his brothers had beaten into his head—using their legs to kick at his shins underneath the table if he had ever dared to take a bite of his meal before their patriarch. When he was younger, Kilian thought the rule ridiculous. Now, watching his tired father slowly bite into a muffin, he didn’t mind the wait.
Their father had taken ill this fall, shortly after the announcement of Daniel and Caitlin’s engagement. His father wouldn’t say what was wrong, he rarely drew attention to himself in this way, but the more tired the man grew, the more concerned he became.
Liam broke the silence first, in his typical eldest-brother fashion. He liked to imagine he was his father’s right-hand man and, in most cases, he was. It didn’t stop Kilian from finding the behavior annoying. “What is this meeting for, Dad?”
“I imagine we’re here to discuss the Walshes,” Daniel said as he bit into his muffin.
A fluttering started in Kilian’s chest at the mention of the Walsh name. Grace’s dark brown hair came to mind instantaneously, the heavy lines of anger that pulled her eyebrows into a deep crease in the center of her forehead, the way her fingers folded into themselves to form a fist.
“The Walshes?” Liam asked, shooting a vaguely concerned glance at Daniel from across the table. “Why would we talk aboutthose people?”
