Page 29 of Robbin’ the Rich

“Traffic?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. I’d always been terrible at lying to my mother. Still, after a second, she sighed softly and smoothed imaginary lint from my shoulder.

“You look tired.”

I almost laughed at that considering exactly why I was tired. “Late night.”

“If you joined us for dinner more often, maybe you’d sleep better.”

Ah yes. The Nottingham family solution to all emotional distress was usually more family dinners. Mom’s gaze drifted briefly toward the sanctuary stage where volunteers were already resetting equipment for the next service.

“You know,” she said carefully, “we still need another bassist.”

I suppressed a groan. “Mom⁠—”

“Jason leaving for college put the team in a difficult position.”

“I helped train Jason specifically so I could stop playing.”

“But you were so wonderful.”

“I hated it.”

She gave me the patient look mothers perfected when they believed their children were being dramatic. “Micah, people loved having you up there.”

That was the problem.

I rubbed the back of my neck slowly. “I’m busy.”

“You play at bars until midnight.”

“Not often.”

“Micah.”

I sighed. The truth was harder to explain. I didn’t want to stand on Ascension’s stage anymore. I didn’t want to help sell certainty I no longer felt. I didn’t want to play bass beneath sermons that preached things I no longer supported, if I ever even had.

“I’ll think about it,” I said finally.

Mom smiled immediately, clearly taking that as progress. Which was exactly why I shouldn’t have said it, because now guilt settled heavier in my chest all over again.

“I’ll see you at the house for dinner,” she said as she turned, making her way down the hallway. No question, just a statement of expectation. That was enough.

Guilt was a currency in my family. Nothing but the church mattered. My mom loved the image and prestige of it all. My father seemed to mostly love the money of it all.

And somewhere beneath all of it, one terrible realization kept surfacing over and over: If Robin ever learned who my family was, she’d probably never look at me the same way again. I couldn’t imagine her in a place like this. She seemed like someone who would be able to see through a facade, even one as carefully crafted as Ascensions was.

There was nothing to be done about that right now. I just had to make it through Sunday dinner, then I would head over to Nate’s for our weekly game. I couldn’t wait to shake all this off with a couple rolls of a twenty-sided dice.

Sunday dinners at my parents’ house felt less like family meals and more like mandatory staff meetings with catered food. The Nottingham house sat on the edge of Briar Glenn behind iron gates that still made me uncomfortable, no matter how many years passed.

I hated this house. It was a massive white brick McMansion, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a three-car garage and a professionally landscaped yard that looked like nobody had ever stepped foot on it. It was the kind of place people in town slowed down to stare at while talking about how blessed the Nottingham’s were.

We hadn’t moved here until I was fifteen. Before that, we’d lived in a normal two-story house a few towns over. Back then, Dad pastored a regular church with folding chairs, burnt coffee, and potlucks in the fellowship hall. He’d preach in rolled-up sleeves with handwritten notes and spent evenings helping people move furniture or fix roofs or sit beside them in hospitals. Somewhere along the line things changed, or maybe money just revealed what had always been there.

Now Ascension Fellowship had a media team and VIP donor dinners and private green rooms behind the sanctuary stage. And my father, Pastor Daniel Nottingham, moved through them all like a celebrity instead of a shepherd. Man of God… What did that even mean anymore?

I parked beside Caleb’s SUV and stared at the house for one long second before forcing myself out of the car.