She flipped me off.
Edge pointed at her without even looking. “Finger.”
She lowered it half an inch.
Regan shook her head but smiled while she did it. The kitchen was chaos. Bacon grease. Coffee steam. Crayons. Edge half dressed. Emily pretending she didn’t like being fussed over. Tank’s kid humming to herself while coloring outside every line because rules were apparently optional at all ages.
Same old circus.
Same noise.
Same people.
And sitting there with hot coffee, real food, and family all around, the truth settled into me heavier than the ride had.
This place had become home.
But home was changing. Men who used to crash on couches now had women waiting in beds. Kids left toys in hallways where guns used to be the only things out of place. Regan’s garden crawled farther every season. Weddings got planned. Babies got passed from arm to arm. The clubhouse still had teeth, but it had roots now too.
Everybody was building something.
I was still sleeping in a ten-by-ten room like a man passing through.
Edge leaned against the counter and studied me. “You sure about this place?”
“Wouldn’t be going if I wasn’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
He didn’t push. That was the thing about brothers. They’d kick your ass if you needed it, but sometimes they knew when a man was holding something too raw to drag into the light over breakfast.
Regan, unfortunately, had no such weakness.
“Does it have good light?”
I stared at her. “It has no walls.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“It has a dirt driveway and a mailbox.”
“That sounds like a stash place. A house needs life.”
I thought of Rylee saying something almost like that once, standing in the middle of the place I’d wanted to buy before everything went to shit. She’d looked around at the cracked tile and old cabinets, nose wrinkled, already seeing what it wasn’t instead of what it could be.
I had seen weekends fixing floors, paint on our hands, her laughing at me for doing everything the hard way.
She had seen work.
She had seen less than what she thought she deserved. I never bought that old house and had regretted it.
I pushed eggs around my plate.
“Life costs extra,” I said. “I’m building a cabin with my bare hands. I bought land. Just pure dirt.”
Regan’s expression shifted. Softer, but not pitying. She was too smart for pity. Pity made men like me mean.
