“I had to retreat to my cabin to get away from you and Autumn and all your lovey-dovey bullshit. I think the two of you might be worse than the twins and their girls.”
“Hell no. Worse than Elias and Silas? Now you’re being insulting.”
I'm just ragging on him. No one is as annoying as Elias and Silas are with the women in their lives. Elias hooked up with River, this big Hollywood movie star. He keeps trying to get me to come over and hang out with them, but what the hell do I have in common with a movie star? Silas is with Tempest, who’s a con artist, which is actually pretty okay, I guess.
“Alright. All three of you are equally disgusting.”
Luke laughs. “You’ll meet some girl and be as disgusting as we are, eventually.”
I stop walking and give him a raised eyebrow. “You going to keep saying dumb shit like that?”
“I’m screwing around with you, man,” Luke says, laughing. “God, the look on your face. Shit, no. I can’t see you being all gaga over some girl.”
I grunt in response. I’m not going gaga over some girl ever. Period. Just because I drove thirty minutes into town for a cup of coffee doesn’t remotely mean I’m gaga over that girl in the bakery, either.
“So why did you come out of hiding?” Luke asks. “You’ve been up there since you got back."
I shrug. “Just taking care of some business in town.”
Total lie. I have no business in town to take care of. But hell if I’m going to admit that to Luke.
“You alright, man?” Luke asks, stopping at the end of the sidewalk. “You’re not sitting up there in the woods crying and shit, are you?”
“Shut the fuck up, Luke.” I shake my head at him as I unlock the truck.
“Autumn wants you to come down tomorrow for dinner,” he says.
“I don’t know." I groan. “I-”
“Don’t give me grief, Killian. You know Autumn. If she wants you at dinner, you’re going to have to be at dinner. Besides, I’m making ribs. I'm glazing them with Autumn’s newest brew.”
I groan reluctantly, but Luke knows it’s a fake protest. I like Autumn just fine. “Tell Autumn I’ll be there.”
I sit outside under the stars beside the pile of planks that will eventually become the front porch I'm going to add to this cabin. I bought this place because I wanted solitude, and solitude is definitely what I got up here. The long winding road stretches for miles up the side of the mountain before turning into a one-lane dirt road, all switchbacks and steep ascents. The cabin sits on a ten-acre piece of land, the nearest neighbor a mile down the road. Cell phones don’t work up here and I’m sure the roads will be impassible for most of the winter. The owner was just glad to get rid of it. Calling it a fixer-upper would be an understatement. Making the cabin livable has been a full-time job the past few months.
I sit out here smoking a cigar and rocking on the chair that was Jack's. Jack Finley is the reason I was in Texas instead of here helping my brothers. He was the closest thing to a father I'd ever had, a weathered old man who worked the oil rigs most of his life and took me under his wing when I first got to West Texas.
As soon as I turned eighteen, I ran headlong away from this town at breakneck speed. I didn't know where I was going and I didn't have a plan because I was just a stupid kid back then who was angry at the world and thought he was invincible. I hitchhiked my way south and wound up in Texas right in the middle of oil rigging country. That's where I met Jack.
My brothers didn't expect me to come back to West Bend permanently, and I'm not sure I even know quite why I came back here myself. I just know that sometimes the places you think you'd never return to are the very same places you come back to as a touchstone. Elias and Silas are still pissed off at me for leaving right in the middle of investigating our mother's death. They think I'm a disloyal brother for leaving when I did.
The truth is that I left in the middle of things here in West Bend because Jack was dying. He'd been dying for a while – lung cancer – but he was a tough son-of-a-bitch and the cancer was a long time in taking him. I thought there was plenty of time, but I didn't make it back to Texas from West Bend before Jack died. I was the only family he had and he left me everything. Everything apparently meant a fortune, including his old rocking chair, which is better than all of the money. But he died alone. I was his only family, and he died alone. The kind of guilt that comes with that has gnawed at my stomach the past few months, casting a shadow over everything I do. The run-ins with Lily at the general store and then at the bakery are the first times I haven't felt that since I got back to West Bend.
7
Lily
"Back again?"
He's sitting in the same spot he was yesterday, wearing work boots and jeans with a weathered green t-shirt this time and no flannel shirt, leaving his large biceps visible underneath the sleeves that stretch tightly across his muscles.