“Already know it.”
Cam tipped me a nod.
Saint kept eating.
Orla flipped the TV on and I wondered how long this would go on. The Kings seemed to change the pace of their lives every ten minutes. Murder to domestic bliss in the blink of an eye. I was never bored, but it sometimes took me a while to catch up before it flipped again.
This, though, the O’Brian bonding time, this I was used to. Just not from the inside, and letting that thought percolate led me back to the last words Nash had said to me in the bunkhouse.
“I don’t want her to be alone.”
Neither did I. But her flat. Herhome. Whether Nash was there or not, it did me in each and every time.
Cam brought me a plate of food. I ate it while Orla chased him into the kitchen to wind him up for the hell of it. I was twenty minutes into a Saint-themed silence when Logan FaceTimed me.
I’d been too long—three days—without seeing my twin’s face to dodge his call. My nephews touched base every day, twice sometimes, if they were up to no good, but Logan was busy. His shift pattern meant he was often asleep or working when I was kicking around, and I fuckin’missedhim.
I swiped the call. A face so like my own scowled back at me. Grumpy was Logan’s baseline if you weren’t lucky enough to truly know him. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” There was movement at Logan’s end. His kitchen. A pile of shopping bags, cos Logan was all domesticated and shit. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Me? I spoke to Billy this morning while I was eating my breakfast, and Sam last night. Where the fuck haveyoubeen?”
“Work.”
“Anything good?”
Logan hurled a jumbo pack of sausages into his fridge before he finally took a seat at his kitchen table and gave me his full attention. “House fire on that old estate by the ring road.”
“Did you go in?”
“Yeah.”
“How many?” I meant bodies. If Lo had pulled survivors from that blaze, I’d already know it. And I knew his fuckin’ face. How it looked when he’d seen the worst the world had to offer. How his big shoulders slumped and his bones seemed too heavy for his body, and it killed me every time that I wasn’t there to put my arm around him.
He moved away, not you.
Cos I gave him no reason to stay.
“Two,” he said eventually. “Young. Such a damn waste.”
“No detectors?”
“Fucking Yankee candle. I tripped over a clothes airer. Reckon it fell in the night.”
He was probably right. My bro had been a firefighter for longer than I’d been a shit dad, and he had a nose for how fires started. Instincts that rarely led him wrong. “You hurt?”
“Nah.”
“Just pissed off?”
“Yup.”
Logan settled into a brood that made me think of our dad. He’d been on the job too. Proud as punch when we’d followed in his footsteps. Fuckin’ horrified when he’d figured out we both liked cock as much as everything else.
Hadn’t outright rejected us, though. Just grumbled under his breath for the rest of his miserable life, and in the grand scheme of my existence on this earth, I hadn’t paid it much thought.
I tried to put myself in Nash’s shoes. Shipped off toman up, but it made me so fuckin’ angry.
