“I think we might be,” Travis murmured softly.
Dammit, Rachel’s stomach did the flippy, floppy goodness oh-so-good acrobatics at what sounded like a Travis declaration.
CHAPTER 3
TRAVIS
Travis preferred to live in the realm of fact. Hey, don’t judge him by his past. This was true now. He’d learned things were easier with data backed up by indisputable evidence. He’d just taken the long way coming into that knowledge.
Now, he understood there was fact and there was opinion.
For example, it was a fact that the boys won their baseball game the evening before, after the uncomfortable squeezing conversation. No one, not even Rachel when she was on a tear, could dispute their win.
It was, however, Travis’s opinion that his brother, Gavin, was the favorite of their parents. He based this on years of observation.
Another fact was that Gavin didn’t regularly make his children a priority.
The evidence? He flew to Boston for the summer instead of bringing his kids on the family summer sabbatical—the one that always took place during two full months at the Puffle Yum Twin Lakes retreat. The summer residence was a twelve-thousand square foot lakefront monstrosity with nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a pool, a buttload of open space, and a private dock for a couple of boats.
The entire Frank family held a two-month family vacation together there every year. It made them appreciate any time they spent apart the rest of the year.
“Do you think he told Rachel he’s skipping out?” Dane, his other brother, asked.
Gavin should’ve talked to Rachel. But Gavin was Gavin and he didn’t do the hard things. The evidence pointing to Gavin’s asshattery was as vast and wide as the Puffle Yum brand’s popularity.
Travis’s stomach wound around itself like a twist tie for bakery bread. He shook his head.
“Nope.” He did not believe Gavin had told her.
“That’s what my money says, too.” Dane kept his gaze forward, but the little tick happening in his jaw belied his outward calm.
Travis’s gut tightened further. If this continued, he’d need a whole bucket of intravenous antacid. This is how it went when he was around Rachel—he wound himself up in knots, especially when there was not-so-great news to share.
Usually, this resulted in him teasing her or matching her sarcasm bite for bite. Even when he tried not to.
“I’ll let her know.” Travis steeled the words and gripped and ungripped his fists. “If Gavin didn’t.”
Dane pulled into Rachel’s driveway, right behind the SUV she’d gotten in the divorce. “It’ll go better if I do it.”
Travis didn’t disagree, but Dane sometimes took the back roads during a conversation when there was a highway right freaking there and the highway version took half the time and half the effort.
Travis opened the car door and stepped out into the sunny day on the quiet street in front of Rachel’s house.
His heart did the plummeting thing that it did when he knew Rachel was facing disappointment. Usually, he ignored it. Today felt…different. Scratchy. So he turned his attention from his feelings to the well-kept pots of flowers around her front steps and the wreath on the door he knew she made herself by somehow weaving twigs together.
She’d given one to each of them last year for Christmas.
“I’m going to shove him in the lake,” Dane said as he headed toward Rachel’s front door.
“Kinda hard to do when he’s not going to be there,” Travis said under his breath.
Rachel’s house looked like it came from one of the Country Chic and Charm magazines—whatever the fuck that meant. They were magazines at the checkout line of The Home Depot, and he’d noticed them because they reminded him of Rachel’s digs.
Her home had been a cookie-cutter house when first built, but she’d repainted it light blue with white trim and added a porch swing next to the all-weather storage bins for the boys’ shit. The fancy kind that didn’t look like storage bins, but looked like benches instead. Bins that were not of the bargain variety.
“My money says Gavin will show up at some point because without him, how would any of us know the exact correct way to grill a burger?” Dane paused on the front step, turning back to face Travis.
“Or drive the boat,” Travis added.
