Page 12 of Holding On To Good

Then he set his coffee on the nightstand for her to finish.

Hopefully the caffeine would keep her from doing bodily harm to anyone before they ate.

Leaving the light on and the door open, Urban went out into the hall. Bella ran ahead of him down the narrow staircase, then waited in the foyer, ears perked, tail wagging. Urban joined her a moment later and let her out the front door. He picked up that morning’s edition of The Mount Laurel Gazette from the porch as she raced around the side of the yard. He’d grown up in this house. Except for the one and a half years he’d spent in State College while at Penn State, he’d lived his entire adult life here.

Same porch. Same street. Same town.

He’d left for his first day of kindergarten from this door. Had jogged up these porch steps after his high school graduation. His dad had taught him how to ride a bike in the driveway, and he and his brothers had camped out endless times in the backyard. They’d played catch and tag and hide-and-seek and had climbed the ancient oak tree at the corner of the yard at least a thousand times. Had broken his arm when he slipped and fell from it one cool autumn day when he was ten.

He hadn’t planned on staying in his hometown. When he was a kid, all he’d wanted was to escape it, to be free of its expectations. Its limitations. To go on to a bigger, better, brighter future somewhere else.

That was the thing with life. It forced you to hold on when all you wanted was to let go.

Now that he was an adult, he’d come to depend on things being a certain way. Counted on the familiarity of this neighborhood, of this town, the people in it. Counted on it and appreciated it.

He was used to this life. To having Verity here. Having her be his responsibility.

And at the end of the summer, that responsibility—to her and their parents—would end.

Yeah, sometimes life forced you to hold on. Other times it ripped everything you loved from your grasp.

It was a real bitch that way.

Tapping the folded paper against his thigh, he went down the short hallway, the scents of bacon, brewed coffee and sautéed peppers and onions growing stronger with each step.

For most of Urban’s childhood, the first floor had been a maze of tiny rooms laid out in a quadrant—kitchen next to dining room next to living room next to front sitting room next to the kitchen. But when Verity turned two, Urban gave up his room to her. Their dad converted the sitting room into a bedroom and half bath for Urban and Silas since Urban was the only one who could share a room with the fourth Jennings son without coming to blows with him on a daily basis.

After Silas enlisted in the Navy, Urban changed their old room into an office. A few years ago, Willow, his best friend and business partner, redesigned the rest of the first floor. They knocked out the walls between the remaining rooms, expanding the kitchen into the original dining room and opening it into a large living area. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors let in copious amounts of natural light, the vaulted ceiling making it appear even bigger and brighter. The dark mahogany beams on the ceiling matched the wide-planked floor.

They’d built and installed new kitchen cabinets and a huge, concrete-topped center island large enough to seat six, painted the cabinets white and the island gray. The coat closet was turned into a walk-in pantry and a large farmhouse table separated the kitchen from the living room.

But even after all the changes, after all the years of him living here as an adult, of him paying the bills and taking care of everything on his own, there were still times when it felt like he was living in his parents’ home.

That he was living their life. The one they should’ve had.

The one he’d never wanted.

He stepped into the kitchen.

“She’ll be down in five minutes,” Urban told Toby, who was taking a tray of bacon out of the oven.

Toby set the tray on the back of the stove, then peered over the top of his steam-covered glasses at Urban. “That’ll work.”

“A cop eating a donut,” Urban said, catching sight of Miles in uniform, complete with badge but minus his sidearm. “Original.”

“I just got off a twelve-hour shift. I’m hungry.” As if to prove it, Miles bit into the cake donut in his hand. Jabbed the remainder of it at Toby. “And tight-ass here won’t let me eat anything.”

“When I’m cooking—especially when I’m cooking food you’ll be eating—that’s Chef Tight-ass,” Toby said, turning the flame down under the pan of hash. “And you’ll eat when we all eat. You want that to be sooner? Make yourself useful and slice the bread.”

Miles finished his donut. “So you can bitch about the slices not being the exact same width? No.”

Toby stirred the hash with a metal spatula. “Then quit whining. Jesus.”

Miles, well used to risking his life as Mount Laurel’s assistant chief of police, reached for a piece of bacon.

Toby slapped his hand—hard—with the metal spatula he’d been using to stir the hash.

Glaring, Miles yanked his hand back, shook it out. “You are a dead man.”

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