Page 93 of Dirty Fighter

“You okay?” I ask, rounding the vehicle to slide under his waiting arm.

Jason hasn’t been here in ten years. And it’s not the same home it was when he left. We’ve talked about it. But talking about it and standing at the foot of the drive aren’t the same thing.

He drops a kiss on my head and folds me into his chest. “Yeah, I’m good. Just thinking about the stuff I want to remember. Before we go in.”

“Dude, that is quite the fountain,” Boomer says, snagging the keys to the front door from my hand as he breezes by carrying a couple bundles of packing boxes.

“Recent addition,” Jason calls after him. “Not original.”

I snort, releasing my arms from around his middle as more car doors close from the street. And then we’re greeting the guys from the team who were able to come out and help. Rux Meyers and his stepson Matty are walking up behind Greg Baxter and Vaughn Vassar, who are arguing about the merits of peeled or unpeeled garlic for making hummus.

Noel Nichols and Liam Diesel are on video calls with their wives, sticking their phones in front of us to say hi and blow kisses to the kids, before flipping the camera to show the house.

More comments about the fountain.

Jason chuckles at the escalating yelps and booming laughter, the music spilling out through the open door and then, a minute later, the open windows.

This is the sound of Slayers Hockey, a team I’ve learned is more like family, coming together for one of their own.

He nods toward the house. “Let’s do this.”

Jason

Being here is weird. It’s the house I grew up in, and yet, nothing about that home I shared with my dad for the first sixteen years of my life exists in this space. In some ways, I think it might be easier.

Walking into the room that was my dad’s office and finding the warm walls, built-in bookshelves, oversized mahogany desk, and deep leather seating replaced by a massage table and five-foot portrait of Marsha on the otherwise stark walls was jarring. Yeah.

But the change was so radical, it almost worked to preserve the memories I had.

We’ve been at it for hours now, and one of the guys— my money’s on O’Brien —ordered a dozen pizzas, a couple cases of beer, water, and sports drinks, and a fire pit for the backyard.

I’m just checking if Grady and Hulls have seen my beautiful wife, when she texts. She’s in the attic crawlspace above her mom’s closet, and she’s asking me to come up.

I pass Bowie on the stairs, tell him to save a couple slices of pepperoni for Rowan, and then venture into the lair. Marsha’s bedroom has been mostly cleared, any clothing she left behind already packed and delivered to Goodwill. The pull-down stairs I loved as a kid are the first familiar thing in the whole place, though climbing them now isn’t quite the same game as it was then.

“There you are,” Rowan says with a watery smile and a little sniff that has me on high alert.

“Hey, what happened?” The ceiling is only six feet tall, so I have to hunch over to get to her where she’s sitting cross-legged toward the far corner of the mostly empty space.

She’s got a wrapped box in front of her, tied with a silk bow. “I think… she must have hidden it up here.”

I sit beside her, running my hand over her back. “Is it from your mom?”

It would be just like Marsha to get her daughter a gift, and then decide she didn’t deserve it. To keep it like a trophy in the attic.

She shakes her head, swallowing hard. Then with a trembling hand, she gently extracts the card tucked beneath the bow.

My breath punches out at the sight of my dad’s neat print and Rowan’s name.

“Your birthday.” It was a couple weeks after the accident. “He must have gotten it early.”

I can’t take my eyes off the card. His handwriting. The latest piece of damning evidence that Marsha is a truly horrible human being.

She wanted his money. She wanted everything. So she stole his will and hid it like another trophy in a house that probably holds more of her sick secrets than we could ever recognize.

That tracks.

But this? The last thing my father ever bought for Rowan. His daughter.