Aidan batted her hand away. “Come on! Is it so crazy for me to take a break?”
“Yes!” They all chorused together.
“If you’re sick—” Luke started, looking concerned, but Aidan shook his head.
“I’m fine!” he insisted. “I mean, maybe my blood pressure’s a little high from five minutes with you all, but I’m good. Great,” he lied. “End of story.”
His siblings didn’t look convinced, and he braced himself for another onslaught of questions, but finally, their grandpa spoke up. “Give the man a break.” Earl said. “Anyone would think you’re not happy to see him.” He gave Aidan a gruff nod.
“Of course we are.” Cassie grinned. “We can be happy and suspicious at the same time.”
Aidan shook his head wryly. They really were incorrigible. “So, how long did Letitia make it in the RV without running water?” he asked Chase, changing the subject. Their brother had just got back from a cross country road trip with his new love – and his hulking Airstream trailer.
“I have running water!” Chase protested, and then he grinned. “We got as far as Albuquerque before she insisted checking into a fancy spa hotel for the night,” he admitted.
“I knew it!” Luke laughed. “Pay up, suckers.”
There was a chorus of groans, as the others pulled out their wallets, and traded handfuls of crumpled bills. Aidan looked around, confused.
“We had a bet going,” Jackson explained. “I said she wouldn’t make it past Connecticut.”
“Tennessee,” Cassie offered.
“Oh, ye of little faith.” Chase gave a smirk. “Letitia’s made of sterner stuff.”
“So, it’s going well?” Aidan asked, taking another gulp of coffee. He’d only met Letitia briefly over the summer, but he’d heard the stories from the others: She was smart, ambitious, elegant – and totally out of Chase’s league. But that had never stopped his brother, and it looked like his roguish charm was paying off.
“Well enough,” Chase replied, casual, but his smitten look gave the game away. “She’s got a new job, so she’s spending half the week up in Boston. It’s working out great, we both have our space.”
“Liar.” Cassie smirked. “I bet you call her every night, missing her.”
“Do not,” Chase shot back, but his cheeks colored, bashful.
Aidan smiled. Chase Kinsella, head over heels in love. Who would have thought it? Not him; he’d figured on Chase being the bachelor of the family for years to come. But now Aidan was the only one left single in the family. Everyone else was happily paired up and settled down, right here in Sweetbriar Cove – getting together for drinks at the pub, and spontaneous dinners, and beach days on the weekend. Aidan had known that they’d all found their way back there over the past couple of years, but he hadn’t really understood why. But sitting at the diner table, surrounded by the warm cacophony of gossip and laughter and inside jokes, Aidan felt an unfamiliar pang.
This was what he was missing out on.
But he’d always been different from his siblings, and no matter how much he loved them all, there was a kind of distance between them. He was the oldest, the responsible one. They could go off on their adventures, not thinking twice about the consequences – because he would always be around to clean up the mess they’d made; fix the problems they couldn’t. It had been that way ever since they were kids.
Ever since their dad had gotten sick.
Aidan had been twelve, too young to know what was really going on, but old enough to be the only one allowed to visit the hospital. It had been a minor heart attack, ‘just a scare’, his father had sworn, but Aidan never forgot standing in the corner of that hospital room, seeing his dad hooked up to all those wires and monitors.
“You need to be strong,” his dad had told him. “Take care of everyone for me, until I get home.”
So, Aidan did. He let Luke borrow all his best toys, and let Jackson eat the last ice cream bar, and he had Cassie sleep under his bed when she got scared at night. And even though their father was back home within a week, back to his old self and complaining about his new, no-bacon diet, Aidan couldn’t shake that sense of responsibility. It had settled around him like an invisible mantle, and soon enough, it was in the background everything he did: from his choice of college, to the lucrative career he pursued, just in case.
His siblings never knew what happened that summer, they just took it for granted that their big brother would fix everything, but sometimes Aidan wondered, who would be around to fix things for him?
“… We can store it at Aidan’s place!”
Aidan snapped back to the conversation. “You can do what?” he asked.
“Store grandpa’s boat,” Cassie declared. “We’re doing a big clean out of the garage. You’ve got plenty of space, don’t you?”
“Sure, but—”
“Perfect!” Cassie talked over him, before Aidan could object. “You guys can move it today. And the rest of the junk, too.”
Aidan looked to Earl, but his grandpa just gave a shrug. “You know what she’s like when she gets a project in mind,” he said. “Just as long as you don’t even think about throwing any of it away.”
“We’re not throwing things out,” Cassie beamed. “We’re making room for new memories!”
After breakfast, Aidan found himself roped into junk removal duties with Jackson, so they went to Earl’s to check out the damage.
“I guess I should pack up the last of my old darkroom,” Jackson said, as they walked around the back of the house. “Now I have my new studio up and running.” His brother had worked as a renowned photojournalist, travelling to some of the most remote, dangerous parts of the world, but these days he worked on local projects, and stuck to travel for safe magazine gigs.
“You aren’t tempted to get back out there again?” Aidan asked, curious. “Cape Cod is a long way from Cairo or Beirut.”
“Which is a good thing.” Jackson replied. “Fewer wars breaking out here, unless you count the fierce battle for gold at the Starbright Festival Nog-Off.”
“I don’t even know what half those words mean,” Aidan admitted, and Jackson laughed.
“You will, soon enough. If you stay through the holidays. They decorate every inch of this place. It’s magical.”
Magical. His rough-and-ready, globetrotting brother really had changed. Aidan’s disbelief must have shown, because Jackson grinned.
“Look, I know this place is way too tame for your tastes, but if you give it a chance, it might just surprise you. It may not have a Starbucks, or a 24/7 gym,” he added, “But the town has a funny way of giving you exactly what you need.”
Aidan didn’t know about that. What he needed was to figure out his next move in life, and he wasn’t sure how Sweetbriar Cove’s three nautical gift shops or seven antique stores were going to help with that.
But at least he knew, he couldn’t screw things up more here.
“How did you find out I was in town, anyway?” Aidan asked, as they heaved open the garage doors. The place was packed full of old tools and junk, piled high around the old boat that loomed in the middle of the cluttered room.