Page 14 of Came the Closest

I’m back in the Adirondack chair.

Now there are random dock posts at the shoreline, dusk is falling, and I know that my late mother named me as the guardian for her four-year-old son.

I’d rather be trying to convince Travis to let me do something to salvage my career. Funny how I haven’t thought about the interview or Travis’s advice to lay low for the past several hours. I guess my mental space was overtaken by Indi’s reappearance.

After Indi’s bombshell, I drove downtown. I didn’t have a destination in mind, but I found myself across the street from Lilah’s Flower Shoppe. Ninety-three percent of me wanted to jaywalk over the weathered cobblestones just to see Cheyenne. She came out of the shop behind a stooped little old lady wearing a daffodil yellow cardigan, carrying the woman’s bouquet over to an old tan Buick. Her long blonde hair had been in a messy braid down her back, she wore linen shorts with a fitted light blue t-shirt, and she’d been smiling.

That smile, and the more rational seven percent of me, kept me in my truck.

I drove out to Graham’s house, reheated the lasagna Ember’s mom had sent home with him, and ate it on his front porch. Washed the container after, wrote thank Jackie for me on a pink Post-It, and put the container with the note back in the fridge just to put a bee in my brother’s bonnet.

I watched the sunset sink halfway over the wildflower field, and I contemplated hitting the road then and there. I might not be expected or welcomed in Maryland next weekend, but if I told Travis I was going he’d be forced to talk to me. Anything would be better than this radio silence.

Instead, I’m right back where I started. Jordan and Indi were playing a game with Milo and Jolene when I walked through the house ten minutes ago. Dad was reading a contract in a manila folder open on his lap, Hazel was flipping the pages of a novel with a bright pink cover, and Gran held Ember’s newest manuscript pages in an orange binder.

No one said a word to me.

I’m not sure I’ll be so lucky when I walk back out whenever I leave. I could probably escape if I went around the outside perimeter of the house like Nash had come in earlier. At least Graham won’t try to talk to me when he gets home from dinner with Ember’s family. That’s the beauty of Grumpy Graham—we could sit in the same room for two hours, I could attempt conversations, and the most I’d get out of him is a grunt.

Unfortunately, the sliding door swooshes open behind me, and I know I’ve lost my opportunity. I begin mentally tallying reasons to give Indi when she asks me why I said no, and I add a few more for when she tries to convince me to change my no to yes.

But it’s not Indi.

Milo walks out onto the deck without closing the door, clutching his threadbare teddy bear to this chest. He wears pajamas—a blue and white striped shirt with sharks on his drawstring shorts—and his curls are damp like he just got done with a shower.

He’s four, I correct inwardly. He probably takes baths.

Reason Number 13 why I can’t be a child’s guardian; I don’t even know their bathing habits.

“Cool pjs,” I tell him, because objectively, the kid is cute.

Milo looks at me quietly for a moment, head gently tilted as if he can’t quite figure me out. At least we have that much in common. It’s too bad my mother didn’t list Graham or Jordan as his guardian. He seems like a good kid.

Just not one I can be responsible for.

“My sister got them when we left,” he says. He has a lisp. Sister sounds like thither, and left sounds like theft. He pulls at the string on his shorts. “Said we were goin’ on a adventure.”

Because your mom’s gone and your dad doesn’t want you. Emotions that I don’t want to feel tighten my chest. Of course, Indi would know how to take the most tragic event in this child’s short life and reframe it positively.

Maybe I should ask her to buy me shark print pajamas too.

“I like the sharks,” I say, grasping for conversation.

He beams at me with two rosy splotches on his round cheeks. “I was gonna get the ones with lions but then I got these. I’m glad I got these.”

“You are?”

“Uh-huh.” His head bobs in a nod. “’Cause you like them.”

The response makes it impossible to swallow, let alone reply. Milo is already that boy. The one who loves a little too easily and smiles a little too often. Who thinks every morning is a new adventure and who talks to strangers when everyone tells him not to, because he knows they won’t hurt them. Not like the people he does know.

I know this because I was that boy.

And Tripp Kolter was that stranger.

“Milo!” Indi’s voice echoes through the open sliding door. “Milo James! Where did you go?”

He has my middle name.