Because living with them means being close. Means seeing them every day. Means this complicated mess of feelings I have for all three of them becomes impossible to ignore.
But what choice do I have?
Stay here and risk another fire? Stay here and watch Jake throw away his career? Stay here and keep being the walking disaster who destroys everything she touches?
Or move in with three men who make me feel things I shouldn’t feel, in a situation that’s already complicated beyond belief, while someone’s trying to kill the sweetest old woman in Millbrook Falls?
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter 24
Cole
Four weeks later
Rachel and Tommy have been living with us for four weeks, and Jake has been in Alaska for four. The house feels different. Fuller. Louder. Better.
I’m making breakfast when Tommy runs into the kitchen wearing Spider-Man pajamas.
“Cole! Can you make the pancakes shaped like dinosaurs?”
“I can try. No promises they’ll actually look like dinosaurs.”
“That’s okay. Uncle Theo’s dinosaurs look like blobs anyway.”
“I heard that!” Theo calls from upstairs.
Tommy giggles and climbs onto his designated chair at the kitchen table. We’ve fallen into routines faster than I expected. Tommy sits in the same spot every morning. Rachel drinks her coffee from the blue mug. Marco reads the news on his tablet. Theo makes jokes that only Tommy finds funny.
It works.
Rachel appears in the doorway with her hair pulled up in a messy bun, and she looks exhausted despite sleeping eight hours.
“Morning,” she says, heading straight for the coffee pot.
“Morning. Pancakes, okay?”
“Pancakes are great.” She pours coffee and leans against the counter. “You guys don’t have to keep cooking for us every morning.”
“We like cooking.”
“You like making sure Tommy and I are fed. There’s a difference.”
She’s not wrong. The three of us have been in an unspoken competition over who can take better care of them.
“Consider it payment for the pleasure of your company,” I say, flipping a pancake that looks nothing like a dinosaur.
“That looks like a blob,” Tommy observes.
“It’s an abstract dinosaur.”
Rachel smiles into her coffee.
Theo bounds down the stairs shirtless, hair still wet from his shower. He grabs a towel from the laundry room and starts drying his hair right there in the kitchen.
Rachel’s eyes flick to his chest, then away quickly. Her cheeks flush slightly.
It’s not the first time. Three days ago, she walked in on Marco doing pull-ups in the garage, shirtless and sweating. Last week, I was fixing the sink without a shirt because I didn’t want to get it wet. She’s seen all of us at various stages of undress, and every time, she gets that same look—flustered, trying not to stare, failing.
