“I just started it. It’s about two firefighters right after 9-11. I’ll let you read it before I return it.”

Yeah, I wasn’t sure that was going to happen after this upcoming conversation. “How long have you been down here?” I watched him pull out the container of guacamole and do a little shimmy in place.

Good. It was working. Guacamole always put him into a good mood. I’d bought it on purpose.

“Thirty minutes,” he answered, setting his treat aside. “I think we’ve got ten or fifteen more max before ‘The General’ is up again.”

The General.

Right.

I held my breath as he handed me over one of the burritos without glancing at my face, fortunately. I thought my plan was working. I thought I was buttering him up before I lit the firework that was his temper. I thought I knew what I was doing.

I didn’t apparently.

Because he let me get as far as ripping the foil off from around my veggie burrito and get all of two bites in before he turned to me as he chewed, raised his graying light brown eyebrows lazily, and went straight for the kill.

“What’s going on?”

Of course he’d known.

I wasn’t a coward enough to slow down eating to drag out the time, so I swallowed what I had in my mouth as quickly as I could without being too obvious. I took a peek at him, planning on making eye contact, but he was looking at the guac. So I did it. Just like when I was a kid, I counted to three and went for it: one, two, three.

“Have you heard of Jonah Collins?”

I would never admit it to fucking anyone, but my heart started beating faster as soon as I said his name out loud to my gramps.

He, on the other hand, didn’t stop eating, but he did narrow his eyes as he chewed, his expression still on the guacamole. “No,” he said after a moment, finally glancing at me in this squinty little way that confirmed he was getting wary. “Why?”

Yeah, he was on to me.

I didn’t know how to answer his question without just blurting everything out, and that wouldn’t be a good idea with Count Dracula next to me. I had to feed him information. Ease him into it. The guacamole he was currently dipping his chip into had been the lube to ease us into this just a little.

I dug through my purse and pulled out my phone and did a quick search, my fingers feeling heavier than normal as they moved. My heart was still beating too fast, but I ignored it. Once the search results came up, I held the phone out toward Grandpa Gus so he could look at the image on the screen.

He took the phone from me with his free hand and brought it closer to his face. “He’s a soccer player? No. He’s too big. Football? No. He’s not wearing pads or a helmet—”

Shit. I had to do it.

“Look at his eyes,” I cut him off, ignoring the nerves bubbling up in my stomach.

Grandpa stared at the picture for a few more moments, his chewing slowing, and I could see when something in him clicked. I knew when those gray irises shot to me for a moment before going back to the screen. This man who wasn’t just my grandfather, my dad, my brother, and my best friend all rolled into one body, typed something on my phone with one hand, then started swiping at the glass. Over and over again.

I knew what he was doing. It was the same thing I would have been doing if our positions had been switched. It didn’t help that I was too much of a chicken to say the words that needed to be said.

He recognized the eyes on the screen. I’d been counting on it. He had seen them even more than I had. He had watched them change over the months from a greenish hazel to the lightest brown that reminded me of raw honey with its flecks of yellow and gold in them.

The most beautiful eyes in the world, I thought.

My favorite. Grandpa’s favorite too, I would say. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Peter’s too, now, even though he was partial to DeMaio gray.

“This is him?” Grandpa Gus asked after another moment in that tone I had only heard a handful of times in my life. Usually when he was furious. Which the last time that had been was… sixteen months ago. Yay.

I nodded, not that he saw it because he was staring at the phone. “Yeah, Grandpa. That’s him,” I confirmed, wincing at the squeakiness in my voice.

Lord, he was breathing in and out through his nose already. I needed to get this over with, quick, quick, quick. Now.

“I didn’t think I would ever see him again,” I started to explain. “I tried reaching out to him over and over again but never heard back. I just thought he didn’t want to have anything to do with… us.” Maybe that comment didn’t help, but… it was the truth.

Jonah hadn’t bothered trying to call, period. If he really wanted to get in contact with me, he would have found a way. He would have found someone to pass a message along. He could have called me from a different number. He could have set up a fake account and messaged me. There was always a fucking way if you needed or wanted something. Always.

And since reappearing, there had been breaks in his schedule. Bye-weeks. He’d had opportunities. But there had been fucking nothing.

Instead, all I had gotten were those four random postcards at first.

Grandpa’s fingers flexed around my phone, and I watched as his mouth opened to stretch his jaw and then closed. Fuck. I knew, I knew, he was seconds away from losing his shit.

“Who else knows?” Even his voice was hoarse. Just five minutes ago, he’d been hiding behind the couch, trying to scare the hell out of me, and now he was trying to sound like Batman. Before I could answer, he shot out another question. “Why are you telling me now?”

Now or never.

“Peter knows. I told Luna earlier. We talked about it—no. Calm down. Quit getting riled up. Your face is getting red, and you know it looks ugly when it gets red,” I told him, hoping teasing him would work.

It didn’t. I’d lost him. I could tell.

“And I’m telling you because he showed up at Maio House,” I rushed, but it was useless.

The old man shot up to his feet, his face hitting tomato red. “He’s not getting anywhere near—”

I sighed and grabbed the leg of his olive pants. “Calm. Down. Jesus, Grandpa—”

“Calm down?” he shouted, making me roll my eyes.

“Yeah, calm down. You’re about to burst a blood vessel, and I’m not driving you to urgent care if you do.”

Yeah, he wasn’t calming down. He wasn’t calming down at all. The redness was creeping down his throat. I knew I had to keep going. “And you know that’s not fair for you to say that. I don’t want him around either, but I’m not going to be the jerk here, and you’re not either,” I said to him, hoping he could hear the reason in my words because, surprisingly, saying those words hadn’t been as hard as I would have expected.

They were the truth. They were a necessity. I had to keep going. “If he wants to be here and is going to be responsible and do what he should have been doing, then he has every right—”

All right, that sentence had been hard as hell, but not as hard as the choke Grandpa Gus let out.

The drama queen, who was red from his hairline down to his neck, threw his hands up over his head. “Right my—”

I had to set my burrito down, knowing I wasn’t going to get any more in my belly anytime soon and curled my fingers tighter into his pant leg because I already knew he was about to start stomping around the room if I let him. “He does, and you know it. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it is what it is,” I tried to reason. “You know you’d be telling me the same thing right now if we were talking about anybody other than your best little buddy, and you know that.”

His best little buddy and my best little buddy. The best thing in my life. The best thing, period.

Grandpa Gus started shaking his head the second the fourth word was out of my mouth. If I thought I was stubborn, this man was the original outbreak monkey. I should have brought him a cannoli too to blackmail him into behaving. Too late now.

“No. Stop shaking your head, nothing is changing. He’s here, and he deserves to be. We can’t force him to leave.” I didn’t want him to stay, but this wasn’t about me either, was it? No, but…. “He can stay if he wants to do the right thing. If not….” I held my hands up at my sides and shrugged, even though he didn’t see me do it because he was glaring at the ceiling.

The point was: nobody was getting forced to stay, much less asked to. No way. The ball was in Jonah’s court. He had gotten himself here, he could decide when he was leaving, at least until I had an answer and a commitment… and he brought it up. Which he still hadn’t.