Why is he there? He could’ve called me. Actually, why hasn’t he reached out to talk about our father?
“Yeah, and Henry is here, too,” he responds. “Just do this once, okay?”
I want to say no, but I’m not leaving him alone with those assholes.
“Fine. Send me the info. I’ll be there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have family shit to do.”
“Your wife?” he asks.
I laugh because wouldn’t that be fucking amazing.
“Nah, I don’t do that shit. My best friend invited me to have brunch with her family. See you later, assholes.”
“I wish you had said goodbye to him.”
“I did,” I mumble.
“What?”
“On Thursday, we stopped in New York. He was unresponsive. I scanned his chart and sent it to Seth. He got one of the doctors to explain to me that he was about to die soon.”
She nods. “You wanna skip brunch?”
If anyone would like to know the definition of the perfect woman, go no further. Grace Aiko Decker Bradley is it. She knows me so well. I do want to stay. It’d be easy to agree. I don’t. She needs her family. These weekly meals make her happy. I wouldn’t keep her away from her people. Never.
“Everyone is expecting Beac’s French toast,” I say, trying to let go of my dad and the call.
She rolls her eyes. “Just so you know, they’d love you even without your casserole.”
“You get muffins tomorrow,” I remind her. She grins. “Only if you stay with me for one more night, though.”
She hugs me, and I absorb all of her while holding her tight.
“What are you doing here?” Mills arches an eyebrow and glances from Grace to me. “I appreciate all the presents, but can you keep it to just one per visit?”
“The last time we visited you ran out of finger paints,” Grace answers. “I’m sure you haven’t replaced them.”
Mills smirks and says, “Sometimes I wonder if the toys and crafts are for you or my kid.”
She grins. “I like to think it’s for both.”
Grace makes her way inside the house. When Arden sees her, he yells, “G!”
“He doesn’t need all these presents, but I appreciate them,” Mills tells me when I enter the house and hand him all the packages we brought. “Though, I wish you had called telling me you were coming?”
“So you could clean the place?” I glance at the living room that’s filled with dinosaurs. “Lucky for you, I’m pretty good at the Jurassic and Crustaceous periods. We can handle this gig.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Not that I don’t like you to visit, but why are you here?”
“We were just passing by,” I lie.
He laughs. “Really? You decided to take a drive and ended up in Canada?”
“Something like that,” I confirm.
“I told you to call him before we dropped by,” Grace claims.
“It’s not like he’s throwing a dinner party and we’re interrupting him,” I state, glancing around. “Unless you called your brothers to visit you, and I wasn’t invited.”
“I knew you were going to give me shit about it.” He mumbles the last words.
“It’s just weird that I wasn’t invited to this brotherly reunion.” I shrug.
Mills grunts. “It wasn’t a reunion. Hayes and Henry texted me in the middle of the game to announce that our father died on Saturday. Somehow, they knew I was in New York. They asked me to join them at Henry’s office. When I arrived, they were on a video conference with Pierce. Hayes is the one pushing for this reunion.”
He looks at Arden and then back at me. “He’s going through a middle life crisis of sorts.”
“His dad just died…your father just died four days ago. It’s okay not to be okay,” Grace says. “How are you doing, Mills?”
“That ‘okay not to be okay’ makes zero sense, G,” I argue.
“I’m coping,” Mills responds to her, rolling his eyes at me. “She’s right. How are you handling it?”
“He isn’t,” Grace responds. “The man is in denial. How about you?”
Mills shrugs. “I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow. There’s the usual anger, sadness, denial…I think we all have that ongoing. I spoke to Vance and he refuses to think about our father until the funeral.”
He grabs a couple of beers from the fridge, and we go out to the deck.
“You okay?” I ask him, pointing at his knee. “While you were with Hayes, you could’ve told the asshole to fix your knee.”
He shakes his head. “We grabbed some lunch after the calls. He seems lonely. We’re all a bunch of pathetic losers.”
I laugh. “Thank you. I always wanted my big brother to call me a loser.”
Mills takes a sip of his beer, looks at the horizon and then back inside where Grace is laughing with Arden. “You’re in love with her, yet you’re just friends.”
“Our lives are complicated.”
“That’s the thing. We just can’t figure out how to coexist with another person. Henry is single. Hayes is still pining for Blaire—”
I whistle. “Good luck getting her to forgive the asshole.”
He nods. “That’s our problem, we fuck up all the time. Pierce is in the middle of a divorce. I only attract gold diggers.”
I’m tempted to tease him and say, “You mean, puck diggers.” If I do, he’s going to tell me I don’t take him seriously—like ever. Arden’s mom did a number on him. The guy has trust issues.
“We can’t find happiness. That curse our grandmother used to warn us about might be real, you know,” he concludes.
Leaning against the railing of the balcony, I wonder what it would take to stop us from doing stupidities. Maybe we keep looking at our ancestors’ failures. It’s the fear that cripples our emotions and gets the worst of us. When I look at Grace, for the first time in eleven years, I wonder if I could make things happen for us.
Maybe someday?
Chapter Four
Beacon
The air is slightly cold and humid. Sweat runs down my back as if we were under the sun—we’re not. It’s already dark. My jaw tightens. “What the fuck is taking so long?”
If this moment had a soundtrack, it’d be something composed by John Williams, and it’d sound close to the score of Jaws. While growing up, no one believed I’d be able to stay quiet in one place for more than a minute. If I have a target, it’s easy. When I use one of my people as bait, it’s fucking impossible.
“Calm the fuck down, Beac,” Sanford says over the earpiece. “We’ve done this a million times.”
He’s right. We’ve been training for thirteen years, working for eleven. I’ve led missions for five years. We’re professional musicians, and also agents for the best high intelligence agency in the world.
That doesn’t make this moment any easier.
He can say shit, but his girl isn’t in the line of fire, pretending to be a naïve college girl looking for the frat party everyone is talking about. Mine is. Fine, Grace isn’t mine, but she’s my reason to live.