Page 83 of Summer Holiday Lifeline

“Forget it.” Spinning on one foot, Jet stormed from the room, swinging the door shut with all the aggression of a pissed-off teenager.

Myles braced for the loud bang, but at the last minute, the door shuddered to an abrupt stop, then gently clicked shut.

Out in the hall, Jet gave an inarticulate shout, and then his footsteps pounded away down the stairs.

Myles let out a sigh and hugged Shelly tighter.

Not for the first time since Natalie’s funeral, he longed for the support group he’d left behind in Calgary. No, he hadn’t been particularly close with any of them, but at least they understood the addiction animal. The only one here who might understand what this felt like was Ozzy, and Myles wasn’t up to seeking him out.

In his arms, Shelly’s small body sagged. She hiccupped and snuggled closer. “Mommy?” But she didn’t look up, as though she knew she wouldn’t see the person she wanted—the person she needed—holding her.

Myles stroked her hair and settled back into the cushions, closing his eyes against the pain in his hip and the greater pain in his heart.

Bathing and changing could wait. He forced away the shudder accompanying that thought and focused on the priority. The YMCA wasn’t going anywhere, and Jet, for all his anger, wasn’t either. Right now, Shelly needed him more. At least Jet understood his own anger. That was something a six-year-old couldn’t get her mind around, and Myles had to be there to make sure she felt safe anyway.

He rested against the back of the couch, closing his eyes and trying not to catalogue all the ways this whole situation sucked.

He felt her scrap, tooth and nail, against sleep until it finally dragged her under.

Laying her on her bed, he made a mental note to apologize later to Lucky about the extra washing the breakfast scattered over her clothing and the bedding would cause. He took a moment to watch her sleep, peaceful now, and sweet-looking. If only that could last.

“Not her fault,” he told the room, or more likely, his own brain.

It took him a few minutes to gather some clean clothes for himself. Then the lights dimmed behind him as he went into the bathroom for a fast shower and change.

Was it weird that he assumed the house would alert him if Shelly woke? A long-ago memory came to him of Ozzy trying to explain why he felt uncomfortable in a lot of shelters. His insistence that the buildings were unhappy hadn’t made a lot of sense at the time. Myles had assumed he meant the men in them created an air of discontent, but no. He was beginning to understand Ozzy had literally meant the buildings themselves had been troubled. Some felt so unsafe Ozzy had refused to step foot inside.

“Not you, though,” Myles said, running a hand over the fogged mirror after his shower. “You like what you do, don’t you?”

The lights over the mirror rippled off and back on from one end of the strip to the other and back again.

“Do you think Steven’s right about his house?” he mused. “That she’s unhappy? That he should be worried about leaving her alone?”

He watched the bulbs above the mirror closely. If they dimmed slightly, he couldn’t decide if he was seeing what he wanted to see, or if they did flicker. Did he want to believe one house could tell him if another house was sick? Was that better than the occupant of the other house being the one with the problem?

“I could ask Ozzy.” He would know just by going inside if there was a problem. “I can ask my ex, sure.” He sighed deeply, leaning heavily on the counter to ease weight off his hip.

What would Ozzy say if Myles went to him, asking for help over the very thing that had ultimately been one of the major wedges to drive them apart? Myles’s mocking of Ozzy’s assertions that some of the city shelters were unsafe, unhappy buildings still made him cringe with how uncaring he’d been. How unwilling he’d been to listen.

Eventually his cruel behavior had been the final wedge. So to go to Ozzy and ask his help for a possibly depressed building now? And for the new—maybe?—guy in Myles’s life. With how little contact he’d had with Ozzy since he’d arrived, it didn’t seem like a fair thing to ask.

Before he’d made up his mind about how he felt about Ozzy, let alone if he could ask for his help, a delicate tap on the door dragged him into the present.

“Uncle My-my? I have to pee.” Shelly’s voice threaded, thin and tired, through the cracks around the bathroom door.

“I’ll be out in one minute, honey.” Quickly, Myles ditched his towel and pulled on his sweats, then opened the door to let her in.

She peeled as she raced for the toilet, and he started running water into the tub for her.

“Will you help me wash my hair?” she asked, voice still a thin quaver.

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“Can I still go to the Y?”

“Let’s get you clean and dressed again, and we’ll see, okay? One thing at a time.”

He didn’t know if he was better off ignoring her tantrum or removing the privilege she’d been so looking forward to and risk setting off another one. He tried to think what Natalie would have done in such a situation, but his memory of her as a functioning parent was dimmed by time and the haze of his own problems that had clouded him at the time. Then she’d been more his ailing sister than Shelly’s and Jet’s mother, and now they were here.