Rhodes
Our brother dearest has a real gift for wrangling the rug rats.
It only took a matter of seconds for Kyler to reply. He always gave me the most shit, probably because we’d been the ones to get inthe most trouble. Kye hadn’t come to live with us until he was sixteen, and even then, it was clear he lived with demons. Even though we were close, he never opened up to me about what he’d been through.
The truth was, I didn’t think he truly talked to anyone but Fallon. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. She was the empath of our family, the bleeding heart who took the world’s pain on as hers.
Kye
Probably good. Because who knows when the baby mamas are going to start coming out of the woodwork.
I tapped the camera icon, snapped a picture of me flipping him off, and sent it.
Kye
Touchy, touchy, hockey boy.
Fallon
Be nice. I think it’s sweet that you’re volunteering, Cope.
Kye
Hear that? You’re just a sweetie pie, cutie patootie, Copey pants.
Fallon sent him a series of emojis I was pretty sure meant she was threatening his life. I shook my head, bending to grab my bag and slide it over my shoulder. When I stood, it was to find Arnie standing there, a grimace on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Got a problem.” He held out his cell phone.
There was a text from a familiar name on the screen. The owner of the Sparks. My friend. But he hadn’t come to me, likely because his back was against the wall.
Lincoln Pierce
Got an anonymous tip about Cope using steroids. Need you to drug test him today. I can’t give him a heads-up or it could call the results into question.
Fucking hell.Tips to the press were one thing. But accusing me of drug use? That was something else entirely. And it meant one thing.
Someone was trying to ruin my career.
7
SUTTON
“You needto stand right here, remember?” I asked Luca.
He nodded, his beekeeping hat sliding around on his head comically. “I’m not scared. They won’t sting me.”
I grinned at my kid. He was the coolest. And way braver than I had been when I first started this endeavor.
So many of the recipes I had called for honey, and I’d had the bright idea that I could make my own by putting hives on the roof of the building. I’d read countless articles and watched endless YouTube videos on urban beekeeping, trying to learn how to do it. While we didn’t live in a city, we didn’t have acres of land to install hives on the ground either.
But this worked. I had three hives and plenty of potted flowers that Thea helped me keep alive since I did not have a green thumb. So, the bees had plenty to feed on up here. Luca and I had built our hives together over a series of weekends last year. Now, it was time to harvest the honey.
There was something about the meditative place I had to go to when tending the bees. Not letting tiny displays of aggression or thefear of being stung stop me. Because at the end of the day, I knew we were helping each other.
I sprayed the mix of essential oils that sent the bees deeper into the hive so I could remove the honeycomb on the highest level. This was the overflow, so they’d still have enough to sustain them in winter—and winters in Sparrow Falls could be brutal.
