Page 77 of Dandelion Sighs

“Will do.” Most likely, Daisy was making sure I got some privacy with my brother. My visit was sudden, just like my urge to harvest wisdom from a man who fucked up with his wife and won her back again. I didn’t have much to say that Laila couldn’t hear, and she’d cheer me up. But maybe there was a chance to pick his brain.

Alder could have all the advice in the world, but I’d burned the most important bridge. He couldn’t rebuild it. Sheridan didn’t trust me when it came to being serious about her. She slept in her office Saturday and Sunday. Today, she claimed that she was just going to sleep there instead of using guest rooms when they were empty. She’d use the bathroom and it would be less cleaning for her.

The woman owned the damn place, yet she was living in the office.

I found Alder in the shop, building what looked like a doghouse. “Getting a dog now?”

Alder glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “The dog has already been got.”

“I saw that.”

“His name is Roger,” Laila said, holding a child-sized hammer.

I held in my laugh. “Roger? Where’d you get that name from?”

“I dunno,” she said. “He looks like a Roger.”

I smiled, lighter than I’d been for days.

Alder considered me. “Laila, wanna go see what we have for a snack?”

“Daisy told me to send you over,” I said to her. “Roger misses you.”

She darted off, the dog taking precedence over Uncle Jasper.

“Trouble in paradise?” Alder asked, leaning against the workbench. The place was meticulous. He was a man who had his shit together. He’d been like that growing up. All but for a few years when he got a taste of independence and partied away his first marriage to Daisy.

He had spent years cleaning himself up, finishing school, and climbing the corporate ladder until he was in a position to win his ex-wife back. Now they had the house Grandma Annie left him, he was Laila’s favorite stepdad, as he liked to say, and West looked like a more serious mix of him and Daisy.

An envy I’d never experienced roared up inside me, clogging my vision until green filled it. Did I have to work on myself for fifteen years like he did? Seemed like a waste of time when I could be buried in her instead.

“How did you do it?” I wandered around the small doghouse that had both a living room and a bedroom. Would I ever be this guy? Making my kids whatever they wanted to spoil their pets? I had thought that time had passed. I had let it go. Why again? I was only thirty-five. “How’d you get all this? She divorced you, and now look at it all. A fucking doghouse.”

“Hard work and determination.”

I scowled. I’d worked hard my whole life. “What if that’s not enough? You and Daisy hit one rough patch, and she was gone.”

Irritation flickered across his face. “And she was right to leave. I was an irresponsible dick. I thought since I wasn’t cheating on her or abusing her, I could do whatever the hell I wanted. She deserved more, and she showed me that.”

I stopped and leaned against his riding lawn mower. It was five years newer and fifty percent larger than the one at the resort. If I had this, I could take hours off lawn care. I had a lot of ideas for that place. It had to succeed. Not just for Sheridan, but because it was a part of the community. “Sheridan showed me that too.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t marry her.”

“Okay.” When I didn’t elaborate, he blinked. “Wait—does she know? About the stipulations?”

I nodded, the gut-wrenching anxiety from that day curdling the acid in my gut. “It was important for her to be successful in her own right, so I didn’t ask, but our sisters so helpfully filled her in on everything at the kickball game. Sheridan had been trying to talk to Aunt Linda about the land, but she couldn’t get an answer, and I never told her.”

Understanding dawned in his eyes, and he grimaced. “And she didn’t take ‘Hey, I don’t want this property or you enough to marry you’ very well?”

Exactly. Unease crawled over my shoulders at the memory. “Have you heard of REG?”

“It’s familiar. Don’t they want to gentrify the bay?” He nodded like the whole picture was clear. “She’s afraid of being put out of business.”

“It was a concern before she learned REG has been snooping around Aunt Linda. They came to the resort too.”

“Heavy-handed?”