Page 73 of Take Me Home

If he was just going to say itlater, then yeah, she was saying it now, first. “I’m—”

“Hey, loser. Hi, Hazel.”

June skipped around the table, her blonde hair in a braided crown, Fair Isle sweater tucked into high-waisted jeans, effortless and way cooler than Hazel could have ever pulled off. Across the tent, the rest of Ash’s family were settling in before a fresh gingerbread kit. Annie waved cheerily at them. Hazel lifted a hand.

Ash closed his eyes and drew in a long, slow, bracing breath through his nose. “We’re kind of in the middle of something, June.”

“In the middle of what? Not building a gingerbread house.” She eyed the mess before them, patently unimpressed.

“None of your business.”

June rolled her eyes. “I see someone’s still in a terrible mood. And still shit at this. I figured this was the last place we’d run into you guys. He didn’t tell you about the Gingerbread Meltdown of 2009?”

“June,” he warned.

She raised her hands. “Fine. Don’t be a baby. Give me the icing.” June lifted her chin and boasted to Hazel, “I’m the reigningCampbell family gingerbread champ. Didn’t even need five years of college to do it.”

“We don’t need your help,” he said.

But Hazel saw the opportunity for what it was. Ash had been her buffer from her father, and now June could be her buffer from Ash. She could just keep inserting other people into every tense situation until, eventually, no one was left. Which, okay, that was depressing.

Hazel passed the icing to June, who smirked victoriously at her brother. He stuck around for a minute, eyes boring into the unresponsive side of Hazel’s face, until finally, he gave up and left the tent.

“You’d think the guy would be a little nicer after freaking out and ruining our morning.”

“Freaking out?” Hazel asked.

June bent to get a better look at her work, which was coming along surprisingly well after all of Hazel and Ash’s failed attempts. “Oh, he didn’t tell you he doesn’t trust anyone to make medical decisions for themselves?”

Hazel gripped June’s wrist. “What happened?”

“Dad fell, and Ash was convinced it meant he’d relapsed or something. We were supposed to go ice skating this morning, but instead, we all had to sit around while they went to the hospital, worrying about something that wasn’t even wrong.”

“Relapsed?” Hazel felt like an idiot having to ask for information that June clearly thought she already knew.

“Dad’s MS. What, Ash didn’t tell you?”

Hazel shook her head. “MS…multiple sclerosis?”

“Oh. That’s surprising. He’s kind of weirdly high-strung about it. Or maybe that’s why he didn’t,” she offered gently, as if this might soften the blow.

That was why he’d seemed tired, why the glint was gone from his eyes. He’d been through something stressful—nota family thing, a familycrisis. And she’d assumed it had been about her. God.God.She’d been snippy with him. She’d maybe even ended things.

“Your dad’s okay, though? It’s not a relapse?” She searched for Ash and June’s father across the tent and found him seated in his wheelchair behind his family. He was holding Ash’s younger niece in his lap.

“Yep. Just my dumb brother overreacting, as usual.”

—

Ash didn’t return to the tent. June and Hazel made a respectable gingerbread house, then followed several paces behind her father and Val in a group migration to the performance area. The seats filled in quickly, but Hazel spotted her father, Val, and Raf in the front row with a pair of seats beside them. She was saying, “I should sit with my—” when an elderly couple shuffled into the row beside her father, and rather than telling them the seats were saved, he checked over his shoulder, the minutest of scans, before gesturing for them to sit.

“Sit with us.” June pulled her to the back of the crowd. They took seats between Maggie’s crew and their parents.

“What about Ash?” Hazel asked.

June placed the fruitcake Hazel was still carting around at the end of the row for him. He turned up midway through the choir performance, taking the saved seat on the other side of Maggie’s kids. He had just enough time to frown at the fruitcake and slide it under the chair before his smaller niece reached for him, and he pulled her into his lap and bounced her idly on his knee. Over the top of her dark curls, his eyes swung to Hazel’s.She looked away. When she risked another glance, he was still fixed on her, unreadable but strangely insistent, as if willing her to understand something he wasn’t saying.

Like…she shouldn’t be sitting here with his family.

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