I glanced up. Mateo was gone and Folk stood over me, dripping wet from the waist down. “Alexei wanted to. I stopped him—I didn’t want Locke to feel like a prisoner. That’s why we never tracked his phone either.”
Another fuck up, but Folk’s lethal stare softened and he dropped down beside me. “I’m sorry I’ve been hard on you. I know you love him.”
“Everyone loves him. It’s more than that for me.”
“I know that too.”
“Do you?”
Folk scrunched a handful of sand, letting it fall through his fingers. “Before I knew I loved Seth.”
Seth. Decoy. Folk’s happy ending had meant so much to Locke. Was it too much to ask for him to get to live his own?
“Anyway.” Folk knocked my bicep with a damp fist. “I’m sorry, Nash. I should’ve been there for you, and I wasn’t.”
“Calling me a cunt didn’t stop you having my back.”
Folk snorted. “Those words never left my mouth.”
“They didn’t need to, but for what it’s worth, you were right. We should’ve told you.”
Folk didn’t argue. He let his arm drop to retrieve something from the pocket of his riding jacket.
He passed me a paper bag. “You need toeat. You can’t fight for him if you’re keeling over.”
Folk wasn’t the first person to give me that speech in recent memory, but fourth time lucky, the words hit home.
I forced the food down. Drank the protein shake he pushed my way. Couldn’t say it changed the world, but my head stopped spinning long enough for me to rest it on his wise shoulder.
He wrapped an arm around me. Quiet and steady, even though I knew this hurt him almost as much as it hurt me. “Locke’s tough,” he said after a while. “I don’t want to fill your head with nightmares, but to be the man he is after the things he’s endured... I’ve never known anyone as strong as him.”
On any other night, I’d have pushed Folk to take a deeper look at himself, but as the perpetual autumn drizzle began to fall, I didn’t have it in me. I could only lean on him and listen to him talk.
“You know it’s me I’m angry with, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of a brother who I had nothing but love for. “Because you didn’t ride out with him?”
Folk hummed his answer, as if he couldn’t face the actual words. He didn’t say anything else for a while. Then he sighed. “I didn’t ride out with Locke for the exact same reason you never told him about Priest. That’s why it’s so unfair that I took it out on you.”
“This whole thing is fucking unfair.”
“It is,” Folk agreed. “But you’re better equipped to deal with it and look after everyone else the way you want to, if you take care of yourself too.”
“What if it’s not enough?”
“Then it’s not enough, but it won’t be because you didn’t give it everything.”
“Is your brother still watching Logan?”
“He’s watching the house,” Folk confirmed. “This time of year, Logan doesn’t go much further than work and the school run, and even Priest isn’t daft enough to hit up a fire station.”
“That’s—”
An incoming disturbance cut me off, raising my head from Folk’s shoulder.
Saint.
He ran from the ocean, phone in his grip, jaw set, pounding the sand until he reached us. “They found something.”
