Page 4 of Whispers and Wildfire

There was a knock on the door, and I shot a glare across the house, as if the door itself had insulted me. It couldn’t be the movers already. I had three more hours. How dare they?

I went to answer it, ready to beg them for more time, but it wasn’t the movers. It was my older brother, Nathan, and his wife, Sharla.

Although we were five years apart, Nathan and I were often mistaken for twins. We had the same brown eyes and olive skin that tanned in about five minutes, thanks to our Italian dad, but Nathan had a sprinkling of gray at his temples, where I was all dark brown, thank you very much.

Sharla was athletic, with a sporty blond pixie cut and a butterfly tattoo on her ankle that she openly regretted. She and Nathan were the type of weirdos who loved to run marathons. For fun.

They also lived a couple hours away in Tilikum, the small town in the Washington Cascade mountains where we’d grown up.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You said you had to be out by today,” he said with a casual shrug.

“And we figured you’d need help,” Sharla added.

“You didn’t have to come all this way.” I stepped aside so they could come in. “I’ve got this.”

Sharla craned her neck to look deeper inside at the chaos of boxes and stacks of stuff that still needed to be packed. “When do the movers arrive?”

“A few hours, but I’ll be fine.”

She put a hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do everything alone.”

“I know,” I said, injecting a bit of affront to my voice.

Nathan raised his eyebrows at me.

“What?”

“You suck at asking for help.” He walked past me straight into the house.

Following him to the kitchen, I rolled my eyes, but he wasn’t wrong. I was terrible at asking for help.

Time for a change of subject. “Where are the kids?”

“With Mom and Dad.” He picked up a pizza cutter sitting on the kitchen counter.

“That’s Jared’s.”

He let it drop.

Nathan and Sharla had three kids, Lucia, Zola, and Nico. My nieces and nephew were a big part of why I’d decided to move back to Tilikum. The whole starting over thing was daunting, but at least I’d be there for birthday parties, school plays, and soccer games.

I’d missed too much already.

Sharla put her hands on her hips and looked around. “Where should we start? I take it everything isn’t yours?”

“No, Jared’s stuff is here, but I don’t know what he’s planning to do with it. He won’t speak to me directly anymore.”

“What?” Sharla’s voice was incredulous. “What do you mean, he won’t speak to you directly?”

“We have to go through our lawyers. As if I have moneyto burn and want to pay my attorney a million dollars an hour to forward his attorney’s emails.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a dick,” Nathan deadpanned.

“True.” I paused and twirled a lock of hair from my ponytail around my finger. “And it might have something to do with the fact that I called him a bloodsucking tick on the ass of humanity who wouldn’t know integrity if it hit him in the face with a shovel.”

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