“Let’s call their moms and tattle.”

Peter snorted in that laidback way that was everything about him. You never would have figured that this almost slender, just slightly above average height man could take down just about any man’s ass if he wanted to. I had always thought of him as kind of being like Clark Kent. Quiet, kind, and laidback, he seemed like the last person who would have a seventh-degree coral belt—black and red actually—in Brazilian jiu-jitsu by day and help me with my math homework at night.

“Did you see Gus this morning?” Peter asked.

“Just for a second. He was on the phone with someone talking about joining a basketball tournament for the elderly.”

My second dad grinned and shook his head before the expression dropped away and he asked, “Are you okay?”

I shrugged both my shoulders.

The way Peter narrowed his eyes told me he knew I wasn’t exactly lying or telling the truth, but he didn’t pry. He never pried too hard. It was one of my favorite things about him. If I wanted to tell him something, I would, and he knew that. And there were very, very few things I didn’t tell him.

Just the big shit.

I had just grabbed my stress ball from where it was sitting beside my keyboard so I could put it back into its drawer when Peter snapped his fingers suddenly. “I got this message from the front desk a minute ago, saying you referred him to me,” he said as he stood there. “But I’ve never heard of the guy.”

“What’s the name?” I hitched my shoulder up again and rolled it back, feeling that pinch again. Since when did I get all these random aches and pains from just sleeping wrong? Was this what happened when you hit your thirties? I needed to start going to my physical therapist. Maybe the chiropractor too.

Peter didn’t hesitate to stick a hand in his pocket and pull out a bright pink Post-it note. He drew the scrap of paper away from him before squinting at it. “A… Jonah Collins?”

I dropped my shoulder back into place and stared at him.

Fucking shit.

Chapter 2

“Hey, it’s Lenny again. Where the hell are you? I went by your apartment and banged on your door for half an hour. Let me know you’re alive, okay? I’m worried about you.”

I hadn’t known when I’d woken up that morning that my life had been about to change with that name coming out of Peter’s mouth.

But it happened.

And he had to have known when I stared at him silently, feeling almost faint for probably the second time in my life.

I had no idea what to say. What to think. How to even react.

Growing a magical penis out of nowhere would have been less surprising than Peter saying the Fucker’s name.

But what hit me the strongest—the hardest—was the knowledge that time had finally run out.

It was a testament to how well Peter knew me that he reacted the way he did. Carefully, being watchful as he did it, he pulled out the chair in front of the desk and took a seat, neatly, an example of the effortless control he had over his body. I doubted it was my imagination that he seemed to almost brace himself.

“You don’t like him?”

Like it was that easy. Whether I liked him or not.

I didn’t even realize I had raised my hands up to my face before they were scrubbing over my cheeks and forehead, sliding back through the ponytail that I had thrown my hair into that morning because I hadn’t been in the mood to do much else. I hadn’t appreciated all the years that I’d made it a priority to sleep eight to ten hours a night; that was for fucking sure.

The “Elena” that came out of Peter’s mouth was the gauntlet he threw down between us.

Not Lenny. Not Len.

Peter had gone with Elena, pulling out the dad card he rarely used.

I was fucked.

The option to lie to him didn’t even pop into my head. We didn’t do that. None of us did. There was just stuff we… didn’t say to one another. We didn’t ask each other certain questions because there was that underlying factor that we knew we didn’t lie. If you didn’t ask, you didn’t know. And if we wanted you to know, we would tell you. It was the way that Grandpa Gus, Peter, and I had always been. We didn’t ever have to say it, but the trust between us was reinforced with miles of rebar and concrete.

Because in thirty years, there were only a handful of things I hadn’t told them about. And I was sure that there had to be a handful of things they hadn’t told me too.

Slowly, I dropped my hands away from my face and straightened in my rolling chair, shoving my shoulders back and meeting Peter’s dark brown gaze. I took in the face that had cheered for me at nearly every judo competition I had been in—the exception being the time he’d had pneumonia and the other time when his sister had died and he hadn’t wanted me to miss out on the tournament. Peter’s face was the one that had tucked me into bed for countless years, right along with Grandpa Gus’s. The face that had reassured me more times than I could ever count that I was loved, that I could do anything, and that I was always capable of doing better.

So I told him the two words that would need to be enough. Two words I didn’t want to let out but had to. Because time was up.

It was one thing to try your hardest and pretend someone didn’t exist, and a totally different thing to lie in order to keep that charade going.

“It’s him.”

His eyebrows furrowed.

He wasn’t getting it. Not yet at least. But he was going to need to because I didn’t exactly want to go into details. Not with the door open. Not here. So I raised my eyebrows and stared at him, trying to project the words back into his head.

It’s him. It’s him, it’s him, it’s him.

I saw the moment it clicked. The moment he realized what the hell I was trying to get across. It’s him. Him.

Peter shifted in his seat, crossing one leg over the other and leaning back as he asked with a funny look on his face, like he didn’t want to believe it, “Him?”

“Yeah.” Him.

Peter’s dark brown eyes shifted over the bluish-green wall behind my head as he processed even more what I was saying, really thinking about it and what the hell it all meant.

Because I already knew what it meant for me, at least to a certain extent.

It meant I needed to start saving up bail money for Grandpa Gus for when he got arrested for either aggravated assault, harassment, conspiracy to commit murder, or whatever the charge for acting a fool in public was.

That idea shouldn’t have amused me, but it did. It really fucking did. At least it did until the other half of what that would entail really hit me.

I’d have to see that prick in court when he pressed charges against my grandpa.

I would have to look at the fucking man who had disappeared for a year, only to suddenly reappear again in the same country I had last seen him. The asshole who had left me hanging. Who hadn’t even had the balls to call, text, or email me back. Not once after the three hundred times I had tried to contact him.

Sure, right after he’d bounced, he’d sent four total postcards that had his signature on them—but only that. There hadn’t been a return address. There hadn’t been shit on them. Not even a message. Not even some kind of code I could have cracked. Just his scribbled signature, a postmark and stamp from New Zealand, my name and previous address in France.

I grabbed my stress ball again, immediately squeezing the fuck out of it.

And if I was imagining it was somebody’s balls… whatever.

“What…?” He didn’t even know what to say. I wondered if he’d written off finding out about him. “Ah… I… he… does MMA?” he finally got out.

I shook my head.

Peter thought about that for a moment but had to come up with the same question I had: why was Jonah calling him? Peter didn’t understand as well as I did how random of a call it was. He didn’t know who Jonah was or what he did for a living. But what Peter did know was that we were family. And he proved that to me instantly.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Has he… called you?”

I sat there still hung up on the fact that name had come out of Peter’s mouth. What were the chances? Seriously, why was he calling him? Why now?

I squeezed my ball some more. “No. I blocked his number.” Those questions bounced around in my skull. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

I couldn’t help but scratch at my throat and eyeball the framed picture sitting right beside the monitor of my computer.

It didn’t matter why. All that mattered was that he had called.

“I don’t know why he’s contacting you instead of me,” I told him, still eyeing the picture in the frame. “But I talked about you enough when we… knew each other. He knows who you are. He knows my last name. He knows Grandpa owns this place. It’s not a coincidence.”

When we knew each other. God, I could almost laugh at that. And I could only laugh at the idea of him contacting Peter as an accident. There was no way that was possible.