Page 81 of Summer Holiday Lifeline

The room remained silent. Still. The lack of response was a bit ominous if he was honest. When had he come to expect some kind of response to his musings from the bricks and mortar and timbers?

“I did used to know,” he said again, a little louder.

The sounds the house made reminded him of wind in telephone wires, the sounds of distant traffic, an unquiet city street at night. He had no idea how she made those noises. Air in the plumbing? Crackling wiring in the walls? Maybe it didn’t matter how, only the message behind them that said, had he known how to deal with his shit, he might not have spent so many years lost in drink and homeless.

He had done a lot of work, a long time ago, to get through his drinking and withdrawal and unhealthy habits. So why was it so hard now to know what was real and what was just a crutch?

“If you’re so smart,” he said to her, “what’s the right thing to do?”

Nothing.

He fell asleep to what could have been distant strains of music over a fuzzy radio, or just the static in his own head. It was hard to tell.

“Mail call!” Lucky grinned as he approached Myles’s lunch table a few days later. “Looks like your mail forwarding finally kicked in.” He dropped a slim envelope onto the table by Myles’s elbow.

“Only took them a month,” Myles grumbled.

“I’ll take a month of no bills, thanks very much,” Tiffany chipped in as she ambled by on her crutches, Jake following closely with a cup of coffee and a laptop bag.

“You and me both, Tiff,” Lucky said. “You got everything you need?”

“I do, thanks.” She smiled at Shelly as she passed, and to Myles’s relief, Shelly smiled back. She’d been a bundle of nerves and tantrums all morning. The simple exchange gave him hope that the storm might be passing.

Turning his attention back to his mail, Myles noted the letterhead from Natalie’s lawyer.

So did Jet. “What’s that?” He frowned at the letter.

“I’d have to open it to know, wouldn’t I?” Myles snapped, immediately feeling like a jerk for his biting tone.

Jet scowled. Shelly’s mood was apparently rubbing off on all of them.

Ignoring him, Myles slit open the envelope and pulled out the letter. It took him only an instant to find the name Bentley Priory in the sea of text. Jet’s father. Myles’s heart thudded to a hard stop as he skimmed.

True to most lawyerly communications, the letter contained very little actual information. Only that Priory wanted to meet his son. Not why, only that it was urgent.

After sixteen years of not caring enough to even contact him, and now he wanted to meet? Because Natalie was gone? Myles hadn’t known the man well when his sister had been involved with him, but what he had known hadn’t impressed him.

Priory was older than Myles by a decade at least, and hadn’t seemed interested in Natalie as anything other than a distraction from his boring suburban life. When she’d turned up pregnant at eighteen, he’d been all too happy to sign away both parental rights and any obligation, financial or otherwise, for his child, or the very young woman carrying him.

So why was he reaching out now?

Myles managed not to crumple the page in a fit of rage while he schooled his breathing to as close to normal as he could manage.

He wanted a drink. He hadn’t felt the urge this viscerally in a long time, and it was barely ten in the morning. Today was going to suck, and he still had to bring Shelly to the Y, then talk to the lawyer. He certainly wasn’t telling Jet about this until he had that talk and found out exactly what Priory wanted.

Across the table, Jet’s leg began to bounce. A moment later, he was rubbing his palms over his thighs and biting his lower lip. Finally, he growled and leaned over the table. “What is it?”

Carefully, Myles folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“I thought all the legal stuff was done.”

“It is.”

“So that’s just a notice, or what?”

“Something like that. Finish your breakfast. We’re bringing Shelly to the Y today, and I don’t want her to be late for her first class. Did you decide if there was anything you wanted to join?”

“Uncle Myles⁠—”