Chapter 3
THREE
LEO
Murder is illegal.
Murder is illegal.
Murder is illegal.
It’s a nice mantra, one that reminds me that no matter what, murder actually is illegal, and I can’t claim self-defense against the man responsible for the—ironic—murder of crows currently tearing up the bag sticking out of my garbage can.
I’m not even angry with the birds. They’re just doing what comes naturally to them. But I would like to destroy the dickhead who lives behind my house.
If I’d known who lived there at the time I was house hunting, I wouldn’t have picked this place. I would have found another cute, woodsy neighborhood all the way across town. Maybe even in another county.
Hell, maybe in another freaking country if it meant not living anywhere near North Wright.
And I blame my brother for not telling me that his obnoxious-as-fuck best friend lived right around the corner with his backyard almost touching mine.
And I also blame him for not telling me that North was currently feeding these flying beasts with a taste for the chicken-and-dumplings leftovers Easton keeps bringing over.
I like the chicken and dumplings. I hate that these goddamn rats with wings raid my garbage every time I throw out what I can’t eat.
Which, sadly, is a lot these days.
But it’s a little horrifying that these birds have a taste for, you know, bird meat. They seem to go wild every time I have accessible chicken in my trash, which is nightmare fuel for my already exhausted, traumatized brain.
I’m pretty sure if I complain about it to North, though, he’ll start feeding them extra chicken, and pretty soon, my entire yard is going to be covered in pitch-black feathers and piles of goopy green bird shit.
I turn and grimace when I realize that the railing leading up to my house is drenched in the stuff.
“Murder is illegal,” I mutter. I use the other railing to brace myself as I make my way up to the covered porch, my hip aching on the way. The pain isn’t unfamiliar, but this feeling of rage is. “Murder is illegal, and it’s bad, and if I kill North, Easton will be sad.”
I don’t like making my older brother sad. I’ve spent most of my life trying to make him proud, and he’s spent the last few years—in spite of my extreme protest—taking care of me.
Not that I had much choice after the accident.
I could barely lift a spoon to my mouth, and my parents were so horrified at the thought of their adult son needing help like a toddler that they packed up and moved to the fucking Florida Keys.
So Easton took me in during my recovery and has only just felt comfortable letting me live on my own.
Well. Mostly on my own. He checks in with me at least twice a day, and I’m pretty sure he’s paying the neighbor to play spy.
“Bird-watching, eh?” Speak of the damn devil.
Glancing over my shoulder, I see my neighbor standing at the edge of his yard with his oversized coffee mug in his hand.
I know for a fact that it came from that tourist-trap gas station on the edge of town because my husband—former husband—bought the same one the week we came to visit Easton right before, well…
Before It happened.
I threw the mug away in a fit of rage after I was able to process the fact that Liam was dead. One of the many things I regret doing in the weeks after I was released from rehab to an empty house and a shattered life.
And six years later, it still hasn’t gotten any easier to see that damn thing in his hand, though I’ve never told Mr. Baylin about that. He’s a nice guy—if not a little overly friendly and definitely spying on me for Easton’s peace of mind.
But he’s eighty-nine and bored. I might be the world’s biggest asshole, but I’m gonna let him have that one.
“The guy behind us has been feeding them,” I say.
“Oh yeah. North. Nice boy. I told him if he throws shiny rocks out in the yard and gives them puppy kibble, he’ll have friends for life.”
So. He’s responsible. I’m still going to blame North, but goddamn it.
“Well, I’d better get inside,” I tell him.
He turns and squints at me from behind his very thick lenses. “You got a job, son?”
He asks me that a lot, and he never remembers.
“I’m—I was—a historian,” I tell him.
That was my former life. I quit the museum the month before I turned twenty-two to try my hand at writing. It was after Liam told me he was tired of seeing me miserable all the time, and I believed he was trying to be supportive back then. His faith in me, whether it was real or not, helped.
I got agented and had four full manuscript requests, and then three months later, Liam was gone, and I couldn’t remember what came after C in the alphabet.
By the time I remembered it was D, the agent offers were gone, and so was that dream.
But it’s easier to invoke the past with people who don’t and will never know me very well. The pain of losing Liam has softened to the point that I don’t drop to my knees every time I think about what happened.
In the rare moods I feel like it, I smile. I can laugh about old memories without falling apart. I can picture him now, staring at me from across the room, silently judging me for the way I let myself go, and I no longer feel like I want to crawl out of my own skin to escape the grief.
But I hate talking about it.
I’d rather carve my tongue out and stick it in a jar on my desk. Which is macabre as fuck, I know, and maybe I should go be a horror writer instead of trying to conjure images of a romance I’ll never have again.
And maybe never did.
“See you later, Mr. Baylin,” I say and hurry back inside.
The moment the door shuts, my stomach gives an obnoxious growl, and I fight back a sigh. I’m not the best at taking care of my basic needs. I usually remember a daily shower, but if I could get away with only needing to eat once a week, I’d be the happiest man on the planet.
Shuffling into the kitchen, I pull open the pantry door and stare at the bare shelves. There are a couple of bags of chips that are clipped shut, but I know for a fact that they’ve reached the chewy part of being stale.
Besides that, there’s a sack of potatoes whose eyes have grown arms and should probably be planted at this point.
There’s bread, but the bag is coated in green, and I’ll have to throw that away as quickly as possible, and on the floor is a tub of cooking oil I haven’t touched in god only knows how long.
I would probably be mortified if anyone were around here to see it, but there isn’t, so I turn to the fridge and decide it’s time to take out something Easton has left me in the freezer.
I open it and blink.
Nothing but an empty ice bin.
“This is a problem,” I mutter to myself.
Not even my internal, disembodied voice answers me back. That’s how pathetic I am. Walking to the counter, I stare into my fishtank holding five guppies and watch as they lazily swim back and forth.
They’re well-fed, at least.
“I should do something about my life, right?” I ask them.
They don’t answer me either.
I make it halfway to the store before I realize Easton has my damn bank card, so I’m turning left instead of right. My thighs are burning, along with my hip, which tells me I really need to start walking more, and I come to a stop in front of the station.
The sun is almost set, so most of the guys are inside, but I catch a glimpse of someone digging around in their car. I can tell immediately by the skinny body and the way he lifts up one leg to balance on the other that it’s Teddy.
I feel a tiny ping of embarrassment creeping up my spine for the way we first met. It was a sports bar that was too loud for him to hear me, and I was the widowed, grieving man who was still struggling with aphasia and halfway through the dinner forgot where I was and who I was with.
That was four years ago, and I’m still angry about it, but it’s not Teddy’s fault my brother tried to blindside the both of us with a blind date neither of us knew we were on.
Easton is a good person—he sees the best in everyone, and all he wants is for the people he loves to be happy.
But he can be a bit of a dipshit about it and didn’t consider that his grieving brother and a guy dealing with a career change and massive hearing loss might not want to dive into a relationship.
Teddy had looked as horrified as I felt when I started panicking about who he was, and he ran off without explaining, only to show up at my door two days later with a written note and a grimace on his face.
At the time, he was six weeks post-cochlear implant surgery—two weeks after activation, so he was still training his brain how to hear again after his sudden and total hearing loss. The note explained he couldn’t understand me, had no idea how to get me to calm down, and he panicked.
He felt bad about leaving me there, and I felt bad about falling apart. We had coffee and became friends and took some ASL together at the local community center run by a pharmacist CODA with too much time on his hands living in a town as small as Harmony fucking Creek, Massachusetts.
“Teddy!” I call out, but he doesn’t turn, which means he’s probably digging around for his CI batteries.
It takes me half a minute to cross the parking lot, and I feel bad when I bang on the side of the car and he jumps, smacking his head on the roof.
Rubbing his temple, he turns with a grimace, but it quickly melts into a small grin. “Hey!” He always talks a little too loudly when he can’t hear. “Give me a second. Hearing’s dead.”
‘Go for it,’ I sign.
I see him relax a fraction. Most of the people around here don’t sign, except a handful of work ASL—as Teddy calls it. It’s enough to get by on important shit when he’s on calls and his CIs can’t filter out the chaos post-fire.
He goes back to frantically searching his car, and I take a moment to appreciate the sunset.
Liam was from the West Coast, and while leaving here to go with him had been hard, and the adjustment had felt impossible, there was nothing like a Southern Arizona sunset.