“Yeah. Voles, plural actually. That’s your sister. It’s a mystery to me why you don’t get on her about marrying up. Maybe because no man wants to move in with critters.”
He hung up the phone and got out of the truck. He assumed that the dog needed to stay inside. He frowned. The dog better not tear up the front seat of that truck....
“How was he?” Lydia asked.
“Your brother?”
She laughed. “What? No. The dog.”
“Oh. Right. I was just talking to your brother on the phone. The dog was fine.”
“Oh, good. I’ll just keep . . .”
She was fussing around, moving buckets out of the way, so he took stock of the place. The little cottage that Lydia called home was ramshackle at best. It was situated half a mile up a dirt road, and back behind some trees.
She had a chicken coop out front, and a hutch of some kind. When he peered closer, he saw that there were rabbits in it.
He liked animals, well enough. But he liked them to have a purpose. Lydia seemed to have a surplus of pointless animals, and he could not for the life of him understand that.
“Just come in for a second. I have several bags of dog food, but I need to find the formula for older canines. And I do have leashes, collars, crates. I have stuff so you can give him a bath. . . .”
“Don’t dogs clean themselves?”
“That’s cats.”
“I have to give him a bath?”
“When he’s dirty.” She looked at him as if he was an idiot. Which was a novel experience. People around town might be a little suspect of him, but they knew he was smart.
In his opinion, smart was a many-headed beast. There was tech smart, which he was, he couldn’t deny. He’d also been given a lot of help. Without the Clays’ guidance, he would never have gotten himself to college, and he wouldn’t have had access to the technology that had made his success possible.
He would never have made the necessary connections; he would never have even known what careers were available to him. For a minute there he’d thought he’d move away. That his whole life would be in tech. But he hadn’t much liked the idea of moving to a city.
Part of him had always felt most at home on a ranch.
It had been weird living in the beautiful cul-de-sac home with Lydia’s family. Weird to have a small yard and a pool, a paved driveway.
Of course, he also hadn’t expected to program a template in his third year of college that was foundational to every relevant social media site and was still being built off today.
When he’d been offered an obscene amount of money to sell it, he’d taken it.
That had given him something even better than a new life. It had given him the freedom to live whatever the hell life he wanted.
So yeah, he was smart.
Though there were a few things that baffled him still. In the top tier were families and why the hell people chose to start them.
Matthew and Jackson were happy, and he loved that for them. But commitment was never going to be for him.
Remy followed Lydia up the paved path, and through the bright red front door, which had a cheerful yellow flower wreath hanging on it.
It was so very her.
Simple but with thoughtful details that were there just because.
That was one of the things about Lydia that fascinated him. She wasn’t intense, she wasn’t on a trajectory. She didn’t seem to be proving anything to anyone.
She was just living.
