Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Myles had enjoyed a longish spell of contentment when, on a blazingly hot Friday in the middle of August, Jet hit Myles with yet another bombshell.
“You want to what?”
“It was Wyatt’s idea, actually.”
“So let Wyatt do it.”
“He’s going to. The Y will sponsor him, because of his situation, as long as he’s staying at the Cabin and working on his high school equivalency. Lucky arranged it for him. But he asked me to do it with him.”
“How long is the course again?”
Jet scratched at the back of his neck and kicked a balled-up sock closer to the pile of other dirty laundry in the corner of his section of the room. “It starts in two weeks.”
Myles stopped tossing dirty clothes into a basket and straightened up. “In two weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“Jet—”
“Think about it, though. We could—”
“What, Jet? We could what?” He wasn’t going to examine the complicated twist of emotions coiling in his gut at what Jet was suggesting. Starting a program at the YMCA in Collingwood in two weeks meant not going back to Calgary for the start of the school year.
That was… Myles didn’t know what that was. Headily tempting. After all, Steven was here, and Calgary was a long way away. And for that matter, so was Bentley Priory.
“Isn’t it at least worth thinking about, though?” Jet asked.
“What about school? Your home?”
Jet scowled at him, then grabbed the basket and started shoving his own clothes into it. “Calgary sucks, Uncle Myles. I hate that house. Shelly hates that house. It scares her. And anyway, we should homeschool her.”
“Wait, what?”
“Or find a Montessori School or something. It’s better for her. She needs something better than regular school, and we can afford it.”
“Whether we can afford it isn’t the issue.
” He’d been studiously avoiding what they could and could not afford.
On his own, he had only a small military retirement income that paid the bills, but only just. The huge sum of money his sister had left him that came from the business their father had started, and she had taken over when he’d died, was something he had managed to avoid thinking about, as had the fact he would, at some point, have to decide what to do with that business.
“Where is this coming from?” he asked instead.
“I like it here, I guess.” Jet was being so nonchalant it was almost painful.
“People are nice. Do you know not a single one of your friends here has asked me about my hair or make-up or clothes? The only ones back home who didn’t care were you and Mom, and Auntie Pat. Everyone else had a fucking opinion.”
“I didn’t know that, no.”
“Well, to be fair, Tris asked. But only because he wanted to know where I go this sparkly black eyeshadow I was wearing that day.”
“Of course he did.”
“But he’d look like a racoon in that much black. He’s too pale.”
“Of course he is.”
“Which I told him, and he agreed.”
“Because he would know.” The conversation had slipped into surreal somewhere along the way, and Myles was sliding down the slope with it.
“Plus, Steven’s here.”
And bam. There was the bottom of that slope. “I am not staying here because of him.” Even though he’d come tantalizing close to that thought himself more than once.
Jet literally snarled at him as he pushed past with the basket of laundry. “I wasn’t asking for him.”
“Shit.” Myles hurried after him. “Jet!”
Jet dropped the basket at the top of the steps and whirled.
“What do you want me to say? I. Want. To. Stay… There. Good enough? I don’t want to go back to that hellhole where Grandpa was an asshole and Mom died and all my so-called friends shit the bed because they were bored and had too much money and not enough brains.
I want to live here where people actually give a fuck about us. ”
“I get that. But we can’t just abandon our lives.”
“What lives? You didn’t even have a job. And I hate that school. Shells is only in kindergarten. Grandpa’s house is a hostile pile of crap.”
“We can’t live in Lucky and Kreed’s attic forever.” He didn’t even think to address the idea the house itself was one of Jet’s main objections to Calgary. And not because he didn’t like the house, but because he felt like the house didn’t like them.
Which Myles couldn’t really argue with, in retrospect. Griffon’s Elbow had changed his mind about a lot of things, it seemed.
“We could sell the house there and buy one here,” Jet suggested, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
“Just like that.” Myles waved a hand like he was doing a magic trick, as if that was all it would take to move to an entire new province.
“Why not? You dropped everything to come here. Why not just keep going like that?”
“It isn’t that easy. There’s a lot that goes into buying and selling houses, not to mention how much red tape is involved in moving from one province to another.”
Jet retrieved the basket and started down the stairs. “It’s only as hard as you want to make it, and I don’t know why you have to make everything seem impossible. It isn’t.” He was gone through the door at the bottom of the stairs before Myles could find an answer for that.
And then, before he could go after him, his phone rang. He would have ignored it, but a glance at the screen showed him the lawyer’s number.
“Dammit.” He picked up. “Mr. Giroux.”
“Mr. McCreevy.”
“Why do you sound so grim?”
“Because you’re not going to like what I have to tell you.”
“What does the bastard want?”
“Two things, actually. One, he wants to finalize the addition to his will of a trust fund for Jet’s education.”
“Why?” Myles didn’t trust that for one second. “What does he want in return?”
“Nothing, apparently. He has no other next-of-kin. Jet’s it.”
“So? That never bothered him before.”
“He’s dying, Myles.”
“So?” He should have more compassion. But there was no way he would let the man get his hooks into Jet now, then die on him. It was the last thing his nephew needed at the end of this already difficult summer.
“He wants to meet his son before he dies.”
“And?”
“A dying man’s wish, Myles? Really?”
Myles collapsed onto Jet’s bed. “Fuck my life,” he muttered.
“Before you panic, let me just say that there are things we can do to protect your rights.”
“Like convince Jet he doesn’t want to be part of a millionaire’s life? Can you do that? Because at the end of the day, legalities aside, what Jet says he wants carries a lot of weight, right?”
The long silence was really all the answer Myles needed.
“He only wants a chance to meet him,” Giroux said at last.
“If Natalie hadn’t died, would he have ever wanted to? Or if he wasn’t kicking it now, before he had other kids, would he have bothered to include Jet in his will?”
“A draft of the will revision was made over a decade ago, actually. Before he was diagnosed, as I understand things. I suppose Jet would have found out on Bentley’s death, or when the trust passed to him when he turns twenty, or enrolls in post-secondary somewhere. Whichever came first.”
“So now, less than a year after his mother died, you want me to introduce him to a dying father. What the hell?” This was so much worse than Myles’s had feared.
“The decision is up to you, of course. Bentley has sent me a copy of the will and assured me it won’t change, whatever you decide to do about meeting.
He’s set aside the funds to pay for Jet to go to university, or college or get an apprenticeship.
Whatever he wants, regardless of what happens with the rest of his money. ”
“What does he think might happen to it?”
“He knows you’ve never liked him. He knows you dumped a lot of your father’s money into veterans’ charities and homeless shelters.”
Which he had, until Natalie had reminded him that her kids deserved some portion of that money, even if Myles wanted nothing to do with it.
“So?”
“So he’s protecting his son’s future.”
“From me.”
“For Jet.”
“Jesus.” Myles glared at the portraits Jet had taped to the wall, of Tris, Ozzy, the dogs, three of his little sister.
Some were layered underneath the rest so that he couldn’t see the subject.
“It’s fucking hard to keep hating on the guy when he’s at least trying to be decent.
A little late, but at least he’s trying. ”
“Not that you need my opinion here, but Myles, I strongly suggest you do this. Eventually, Jet will know you had this choice. What you decide now might, years down the line, change how he sees you forever.”
“Yeah.” Didn’t he know that. How much had he learned to hate his father when he’d sold their family farm out from under them?
How much resentment had boiled in him when he’d realized he would never get the choice of living off the land his great-grandfather had struggled so hard to hold onto?
How much regret had he lived with, that the last place his mother had known, where all of Myles’s own memories of her had lived, meant nothing to his father?
Or was it that it had meant too much, and his father hadn’t been able to overcome his own issues to see what his kids had needed? “Goddammit,” he whispered.
All that bitterness had shaped the person Myles grew into. It had drawn him down dark roads he’d almost not managed to find his way back from.
“I know you pay me for legal advice, Myles. But as a father of teenagers, I can tell you that autonomy is very important to them.”
“You want me to let Jet decide what to do? With this? Do you know how huge it is?”
“I think you should present him with all the options. And I do mean all of them. Including the one where you assure him you’ll support his decision. Back him up. Show him that you trust him to make good decisions. That you’ll help if he trips up.”
“All the things my father never did for me.”
“If that’s how you want to characterize it, sure. Though in my experience, framing things in a negative light tends to show you a negative picture. What about doing all the things you feel your sister would want you to do for them? She was a good mother.”
“And a good sister.”
“And that. A good friend, too.”