He snorted. “Yeah. Those SoCal teams are fucking brutal. Who would have thought, you know? Like, fuckers have weed and the beach. What are they so pissed about?”
Probably because their teams were shit and hadn’t seen a playoff game in about six years, but what the fuck did I know?
“Getting on a plane with my ribs swollen as fuck didn’t help,” I told them, trying to make sense of what I was holding. It looked like some kind of repair bill, so I set it to the side. “So, what am I looking for here?”
“Doctor office appointment notices or anything for neurology,” Nikos said. “A lot of this stuff looks like Peter’s wifehad been using his closet for storage. I don’t even think any of this shit is what most people keep. Not even for taxes.”
“It definitely isn’t,” Ford said with a grimace. “No one is ever going to ask for a four-year-old receipt for dishwasher repair.” He tossed another sheet of paper away. “God, she’s such a fucking bitch.”
I winced. “Jonah’s mom?”
Ford hummed as he thumbed through a bunch of stapled yellow receipts. “Yeah. She did a fucking number on him, Micah, and Caleb.”
“Micah’s the one who plays in Salem, right?”
Ford looked up with a small smile. “You’re such a fucking hockey player. Yes, bud. The one who plays for the Fury.”
I flushed. “Sorry. I try to remember more things about people, but…it’s hard.”
“I’m just giving you shit.” He reached over and gave my leg a pat before going back to his task at hand. “Anyway, it’s a wonder those guys grew up as stable as they are, you know? When you have that kind of shit happening from birth.”
I looked over at Nikos, who seemed as confused as I was. “Uh…what shit?”
“You know, the whole social media thing?” Ford said, waving his hand. “When Micah and Jonah were…I don’t know, seven or eight—something like that—their mom started a YouTube channel called The Blind Thing, and every week, she’d make the boys answer a bunch of really invasive questions from total randos online. I’m talking weird shit, like how do they wipe their ass and do they know what naked ladies feel like.”
My gut twisted. “Are you serious? They were babies!”
“I know. She had millions of followers too. She had them trained to perform, and there were these daily videos, like ‘Cooking Blind with Jonah’ or ‘Brushing My Teeth Blind with Micah.’ Sometimes she’d get Caleb involved, but he has someusable vision, so she didn’t bother unless she was on her soapbox about blindness being a spectrum.”
I’d been speaking English for years, but his words started to feel like one big jumble in my head, and I couldn’t make sense of them all.
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she’s a fucking weirdo,” Ford said, looking up as he finished going through the last bit of his papers. He tossed them back into a box and let his head thud against the wall beside his crutches. “I think they realized it wasn’t normal after a while and started giving her pushback, but she was relentless. She wrote a book about her experiences and thought she was going to become famous for it. She put them in hockey after that, and, well, we all see how that went.”
I frowned. “They’re both amazing.”
Ford burst into laughter. “Yeah, that’s what I mean. They were finally able to shine on their own. Caleb moved out and started a blacksmithing company, Jonah and Micah were drafted into the PPHL, and the moment they got distance from her, they started scrambling for more.”
“Their dad,” I started, but Ford cut me off with an irritated noise.
“He wanted no part of it. Never did.”
I wanted to defend him, but the way he’d been with Nikos at first, I knew Ford was telling the truth. Peter was kind to me most of the time, but not always. And the things Jonah had said—the things he’d implied—I couldn’t ignore those now.
Biting my lip, I stared at the papers in my hands. It was for payday loans, and my stomach twisted.
“Why don’t the other two come help their brother?” I asked quietly.
Ford let out a puff of air. “Jonah…” He bit his lip, then shrugged. “Listen, I love Jonah to death. He’s such a goodperson. But he will literally set himself on fire if it means keeping people warm. Sometimes the people he’s keeping warm are the ones who hurt him. Micah and Caleb aren’t built like that. And I think mostly they’re hoping Jonah will start prioritizing himself. They don’t want to enable him.”
“But he needs help,” Nikos said. “Jonah can’t take care of Peter by himself.”
“Yeah,” Ford said from behind a sigh. “He does. I don’t like their dad. He never stopped his wife from exploiting their kids, and he kind of went out of his way to ignore the fact that the boys were blind and needed help in ways that he wasn’t prepared to give. For a while, I think Jonah wanted to believe his dad was being taken advantage of by their mom just like they were, but…” Ford trailed off and shrugged. “After he moved out, I think he had to face the fact that his dad wasn’t a victim. He was complicit in other ways.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
