“I mean,” Ellie says, giggling, “it has a jacuzzi! It doesn’t get better than a traveling jacuzzi.”
I resist the urge to glance back at the screen again, to find out more information about this fight, which seems like a bigger deal than the usual hockey fights.
“Yeah,” I say, hoping Ellie can’t hear how half-hearted my answer is. “You probably can’t.”
CHAPTER 12
JAKE
When I wake up, my mouth tastes like death and my head is spinning, threatening to make me sick again.
Last night’s single drink turned into a lot of drinks, which turned into getting kicked out because some asshole recognized me and asked if I was going to punch him when he was down, too. When I promised to do a lot more than that, the bartender told me it was time to go.
My eyes focus, and I find the source of the sound that’s woken me up only hours after I managed to fall asleep: my phone on the bedside table, vibrating and lighting up.
Shelby Bradson.
“Fuck,” I mutter, rolling onto my stomach and burying my face in my hands. One call from my sister is the standard — her trying to connect with me, thinking about me, or wanting to fill me in on Wildfern Ridge shit I don’t care about.
This many calls, back-to-back, can’t be good.
When I raise my head up and look around my apartment, I see the bland stainless-steel appliances, the huge TV, the glass of water last-night Jake placed on the coffee table for me. I thank him and take a drink, even as the pain of last night pounds through my brain, like a pulsing nestled in my skull.
Then, slowly, like my hand is moving through water, I reach for the bedside table and scoop up the phone just as it stops ringing. I start to move through the process to call her back, but it lights up with another call from her.
“Hello?”
“You sound like shit,” Shelby says, and there’s the sound of something in the background — maybe a drill?
“Is that why you called?”
“No.”
When she pauses, a deep, sure feeling settles in my gut. A certain knowledge that surpasses any logical reasoning, so when she finally clears her throat and tells me, I already know.
“Dad is dead, Jake.”
I pause, waiting for those words to bowl me over, but instead I feel nothing. Like the news was a bullet bouncing off a suit of armor. My dad is dead, and I don’t feel a thing about it.
“Okay. Was there anything else?”
“You don’t have to be an asshole,” she says, and I can practically picture her rolling her eyes. As much as I was pissed at her that first year after I left, I also couldn’t blame her for not wanting to come with me. What teenage girl wants to live with her teenage brother in a completely new town?
But I was lonely in Ann Arbor. And I spent enough time worrying about her that I didn’t have the same social life as the other players on the team. They took to calling me “Grandpa Jake” because I was always in bed on the weekends rather than out partying with the team.
“Yes,” Shelby goes on, sounding exasperated, “there is something else.”
Dread settles in the pit of my stomach.
“…he left the house to you, Jake.”
“He left the house to me?”
“The lawyer went through the will with me this morning. You haven’t answered any of my calls this week, and we couldn’t postpone it any longer. I figured you wouldn’t care. Until I found out he left the house to you.”
“What did he leave to you?”
“The business.”
