Page 2 of Owl’s Cherished Mate

I wanted to push. I wanted to sit beside him and make him talk to me, make him tell me what was going on in that head of his. I’d learned the hard way that pushing Lawson only made him dig in harder.

“Fine.” I sighed. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Don’t care.”

“Okay.” The word dragged out. “I’ll figure something out.”

He grabbed his phone from the cushion beside him and stood, heading for his room without another word. As he passed me, I caught a whiff of weed clinging to him. It wasn’t the first time. I’d been trying not to flip out about it because I remembered being fourteen and doing the same thing. The weed wasn’t what scared me.

It was everything else.

“Hey,” I called out.

He paused but didn’t turn around.

“That hoodie. Where’d you get it?”

“A friend.”

“Which friend?”

His shoulders stiffened. “Does it matter?”

“Never mind,” I said, deciding this wasn’t a battle worth fighting.

He was fourteen, and even though I was his older sister and not his mom, I was still the enemy. He disappeared down the hall, and a second later, his bedroom door closed.

Had I really smelled weed on him?

Music came from his room a moment later, filtering through the thin walls of the house. It was way too loud and heavy with bass.

With a sigh, I walked back to the kitchen. The dishes from this morning were still in the sink and more had been added—his cereal bowl, a glass with orange juice residue at the bottom, a butter knife caked in peanut butter, and a plate. I washed them all by hand because the dishwasher had been broken since before Dad was arrested and I couldn’t afford to fix it any more than he could have.

While I scrubbed, my mind did what it always did. It analyzed the conversation with Lawson.

The hoodie wasn’t his. The weed smell wasn’t from school because he hadn’t gone today. And a friend could mean a lot of things, but I had a sick feeling it meant one person in particular—possibly two.

Darren and his younger brother, Cade.

Darren had been in and out of our lives since I was a teenager, always hovering around Dad’s operations, always smiling that cold smile of his that never reached his eyes. When Dad went to prison, I thought Darren would disappear from our lives for good. Instead, I was afraid he’d latched onto Lawson. Cade too, which made sense because Cade was closer to Lawson’s age. Somewhere over the last few months, the two of them had gotten tight.

I couldn’t prove anything, though.

Lawson wouldn’t tell me where he went or who he was with half the time, which was why I’d installed a tracking app on his phone two weeks ago. The fact that I needed to track my fourteen-year-old brother made me uneasy, but I didn’t know what else to do. He snuck out at least twice a week. Sometimes more. He came home smelling like weed, and every conversation between us turned into a fight.

I was twenty-two years old, and I was failing at the one thing that mattered most.

The water ran over my hands as I rinsed the last dish and set it in the rack to dry. I wiped my hands on a towel, leaned against the counter, and closed my eyes.

Two years ago, I’d just settled in at State to study nursing and was sharing an apartment with a girl named Emily who had a cat named Pumpkin. It was the first time in my life I’d felt like I could breathe, like maybe I wasn’t trapped in Driftwood Cove, defined by my last name, or destined to spend my whole life cleaning up after my father.

Then the call came a few months ago that Dad had been arrested and Lawson had no one. If I didn’t come home, he’d go into the system.

So I came home.

I packed my car, withdrew from nursing school, and drove back to the town I’d spent years trying to leave. I walked into the courthouse and signed the guardianship papers, and just like that, my life became this.

Work. Lawson. Worry. Repeat.