Page 188 of Twins for Three Bad Boys

I’ve always been good at temporary.

That’s one of my talents.

Knowing how to step in warm. Leave gently. Keep enough of myself moving so that nothing can fully pin me down. Even in Redwood Run, even with the garage, with the boys, with Bolt asleep half the time in whatever patch of sun he can find, I’ve always kept one foot angled toward the door.

Not because I didn’t love them.

Because I did.

And loving things has always felt safer when I could leave before they asked too much of me.

Only June never asked.

That’s the problem.

She just looked at me with those bright green eyes and laughed as if I was the funniest man alive, and touched me because she meant it, and made space for me without ever making me feel unwelcome.

Then she went and sat in that café crying over her pregnancy, and all I could think was, mine or not, I didn’t want her doing any of this without me.

Without us.

I scrub a hand over my beard and glance at the clock on the dash.

Another forty-five minutes before I make it to my father’s place outside Jacksonville.

My brother Caleb already texted twice to ask if I’m actually showing up this time or if “passing through” means stopping long enough to wave from the interstate and keep going.

Smartass.

He gets that from me, which annoys him whenever I point it out.

Bolt lifts his head, one ear half-cocked, and huffs at me because I’ve disturbed his beauty sleep with my existential crisis.

“You’re no help,” I tell him.

He yawns.

Fair enough.

By the time I turn off the highway, the rain has mostly burned away. Florida evening settles warm and damp over everything, thick southern air wrapping around the truck the second I crack the window. The trees look different here than they do up in Redwood Run. Broader somehow. Less guarded. More sprawling. Palm fronds mixed with oak and hanging moss, the whole place green in a way that feels lazier than the Pacific Northwest’s sharp, pine-heavy hush.

Home, in the loosest possible sense.

Dad’s place sits back from the road in a modest strip of land he swore for years he’d “fix up properly” and then never did beyond the parts that mattered. The porch is solid. The roof doesn’t leak. There’s a grill out back, a shed with too many tools in it, and wind chimes that my late mother picked out years ago and Dad never took down.

That’s him all over.

Practical in every visible way. Sentimental in all the ones he thinks no one notices.

I pull up beside Caleb’s truck and kill the engine.

Bolt perks up for real now, tail giving one hopeful thump.

“Yeah, buddy,” I murmur. “You can go see if anyone’s dumb enough to feed you twice.”

He almost is, too. Dad still pretends Bolt needs “extra table scraps for his age,” which is nonsense because the dog is old, not starving.

The front door opens before I even make it to the porch.