When Forever Ended Page 2

  "Not really." Matt scrunched his nose. "I was like six. I remember you showin' me the marina. That was fun."

  I remembered that, too. Matt had bounced in happiness when seeing the boats, the sea gulls, and the fishermen working. Ten years had passed since then, and now we were here to stay.

  Camassia Cove had changed a lot in the past decade. A community college had opened in Cedar Valley, turning the old factory hood in the south into a booming district with a college-town feel. If houses weren't too pricey, the Valley could be a good place for us to find a home.

  I got started on dinner, and Matt asked questions here and there about Camassia and the five districts. I did my best to answer them, though I suspected my replies were a bit outdated. It used to be a sparsely populated little town with few opportunities.

  "This friend you wanted to reunite with… Where does he live?" he asked. "What's his name?"

  I swallowed and put the chopped bacon in a skillet as I waited for the tightening in my chest to fade. "Downtown." I knew the street, too. I was just too chickenshit to go see him.

  I hadn't reconnected with any of our friends from school, except one. Last week, I ran into Adam Grady. Back in the day, Will and I hung out a lot with the Grady brothers, especially Adam and his twin brother, Jack. Adam told me where Will lived, and we'd made loose plans to meet up for a beer soon.

  "Can we live there?" Matt asked. "It's close."

  Downtown was also expensive. It used to be the town center. We had the public marina there, the city council, the oldest cafés and shops, and everything centered around tourism, fishing, and preserving the town's heritage. Besides, if Will didn’t want to have anything to do with me, us living in the same neighborhood—one of the smallest districts, to boot—wasn’t smart.

  There was also the chance of running into Will's parents, something I was willing to do anything to avoid. It wouldn’t surprise me if they lived in the same house now as they did over twenty years ago.

  "We'll see, kid." I checked the pasta and threw in some garlic powder. "We have a couple months to figure shit out. How's the job search goin'?"

  Strict budget didn’t come close to reality. We lived here for free in exchange for doing maintenance, and I had a meager salary for being in charge of the activities on the island. We needed another income while I got my business up and running for the fall.

  Matt narrowed his eyes at me. "You got all testy last time I brought that dude up, too. What's the big deal?"

  "I think I'm allowed to be uncomfortable," I shot back. "Now, let's move on."

  He left the couch to sit on the counter, and I drew in a breath to keep my temper in check. I needed to do the sauce, not bitch at my son. Especially if he was right. I had dodged this subject as much as possible since last year when I told Matt we were moving here.

  In my defense, he hadn't asked very much, so it was new to me.

  "Can you tell me why you were eye-balling Brady today?"

  "Who?" Was that the camp counselor?

  "The guy who helped me with the jet skis." Matt stole my coffee and took a sip. "Ain't he a bit too young for you?"

  "Hey." That was a real goddamn warning. Anger simmered right below the surface, and I couldn’t fucking believe he went there.

  Matt grinned but shrank back a little at my glare. "Sheesh, I was just kidding."

  "It wasn’t funny," I replied irritably.

  Check yourself, man. For fuck's sake.

  I blew out a breath and shifted from foot to foot. "Do you know him?"

  Matt shook his head. "Making friends isn't easy."

  I put down my knife and gave his leg a squeeze. "It's only been a couple weeks. Trust me, you'll have new buddies in no time." The camp was the perfect place for it, too. Kids from all over Washington came here, and there were plenty of people Matt's age he'd get to know.

  Finding the balls to reconnect with old friends was harder.

  *

  That Brady boy was back the next day. I eavesdropped enough to learn he'd been previously assigned to kitchen duty at the camp, but he'd traded with some girl. Now he was happy as could be to help kids around Little Chinook with water activities.

  The little beach as well as the bay were packed with kids all day. Five counselors pre-college age and two who were around my age ran themselves ragged. There was kayaking, jet skiing, swimming, sailing, snorkeling, and fishing going on. I trekked the island from station to station to make sure everything worked. If a jet ski didn’t start, I was there. If a kayak capsized, Matt and I headed out with the boat to help.

  Memories were coming back to me. Not enough had changed on the island and in the camp. I remembered in the final days, kids were either tired and ready to go home, or they were hyped up and trying to get as much done as possible. Children paired off and exchanged phone numbers. Ice cream and hot dogs were inhaled, and the drama flowed freely as young emotions ran high. Girls with crushes, boys with tempers.

  My radio crackled, and Keep was summoned to the dock with a first aid kit.

  Some kid had been bitten in the foot by a crab.

  I didn’t laugh it off, even though I wanted to. I knew how much that shit hurt.

  "Stop fucking laughing!" I growled at Will. Limping over to a rock, I inspected my toe. The damn crab had brutally savaged my cuticle, and I wiped away a massive drop of blood.

  "You big baby." Will chuckled and squatted down in front of me. He had the sun behind him, and drops of salty water clung to his dark hair. He held my foot carefully. "I think you'll live." Not an ounce of ginger in him, but he had freckles if you looked close. And his smile bugged the shit out of me! 'Cause it made me wanna smack him and grin at the same time.

  I trailed down to the dock where a group of kids was fishing for crab. Or they had been, until a girl was screaming bloody murder.

  She couldn’t be more than ten.

  Her counselor explained what'd happened, and she looked queasy at the look of my first aid kit, so I deduced it was up to me. One might wonder what the young woman was doing working at a camp if the sight of blood made her wanna barf.

  "How you doin', kiddo?" I crouched down by the rock where the little girl was sitting. "Can I see your foot?"

  She sniffled, and a friend came over to hang a towel over her shoulders as she lifted her foot for me.

  I smiled. "Don't worry, you'll be good as new in a few minutes."

  I'd just cleaned the two little cuts when Brady jogged over.

  "What happened, Annie?"

  "A crab pinched me really hard."

  "She'll be fine," I said, pulling off a piece of tape. It had already stopped bleeding, and a Band-Aid would fall off the minute she went back in the water.

  Once I was done, I straightened and side-eyed the kid. Brady, not the little girl. There was no question he was related to Will. I just didn’t know how. Will had a brother, though he'd always talked about getting as far away from Washington as possible. Then again, childhood plans changed.

  Mine sure had.

  Annie went back to play with her friends, and I took the opportunity to dig a little.

  "We haven't been introduced." I extended a hand to Brady. "I'm Kelly Oakley, the new Keep."

  He gave me a stiff smile before letting out a chuckle. "Kelly's my middle name. I go by Brady, though." He shook my hand firmly, and I reeled internally at that tidbit. Hell, my fucking face felt hot. Chest tight. "Brady Calvert."

  "Any relation to Will Calvert?"

  "William—yeah, he's my dad." Brady cocked his head, curious, while I was trying not to flinch at the gut punch. So Will was a dad, too. And Brady had to have been at least eighteen to work at the camp. "Do you know each other?"

  "We used to." I smiled faintly. "We went to school together."

  "Cool." Brady didn’t actually think so. Talking to an old buddy of your father's was anything but cool. But knowing Will, he would've raised a polite kid.

  I let him get back to his work, and I kinda regret
ted opening my big fucking mouth to Brady in the first place. I should man up and go see Will in person, not fish for details from his boy.

  *

  Matt was cooking dinner tonight, so after my supply run to the mainland, I snatched up an apple, pulled out my photo albums and a notepad, and sat down to do some math.

  "Where's the damn… Never mind." Matt opened a cupboard and found whatever he'd been looking for. "Hey, Dad?"

  "Yeah?" I began my investigation by jotting down the puzzle pieces I knew. Will, his age, Brady. Then I went through my almost-two decades of knowing my friend. He was traditional, mellow, humble, and selfless. He'd want his version of what kids deserved—a home with two parents. I guessed he was married or possibly divorced.

  His folks were strict. Will would've married before having Brady.

  Figures. Kissing me had a been a phase.

  "You once told me you named me after a friend," Matt said.

  "I did." I threw away the core once done with my apple and drew a black line between Will and Brady.

  "Was that the guy you wanted to reconnect with here?"

  I glanced over at him, wondering where he was going with this. "Yes."

  "So his name is Matthew? Or William?"

  "William."

  He bobbed his head and focused on cooking, so I dragged my focus back to the notepad.

  Will and I were forty-three, and he'd had Brady at around twenty-five if the kid was eighteen… I left Camassia right after turning nineteen. So that left a gap of six years. Six years to meet someone, get through college, get married, and have a child. Fuck, add graduate school, too. My childhood friend had wanted to be a doctor. His goals were higher than my wildest dreams, and he achieved them. I had no doubt. Every grade he'd brought home was an A. B+ on a rainy day.

  I leaned back on the couch and threaded my fingers together at the back of my head.

  "I'll tutor you," Will offered.

  I snorted and threw the test in the trash. "I don’t think so. I'll be fine."

  He frowned, troubled, but didn’t say anything as we walked down the hall toward the cafeteria.

  Eventually, he'd helped me pass several classes.

  Tall, lanky, nerdy, quiet Will Calvert. Fastest on the swim team, oblivious to the girls who crushed on him. He'd worked extra at the mayor's office, while I had picked up shifts in a factory.

  Senior year, I shot up in height as he bulked up a bit. I had him beat in every team sport I tried out for, he had a couple inches on me in height, I outran him, his grades made his parents proud… We'd competed in everything, though I knew—now—he'd only done it to humor me. He didn’t have a competitive bone in him.

  I smirked to myself, remembering his folks telling him I was a bad influence. Unbeknownst to them, I'd been hiding in his closet when they said that because it was past curfew. So after that, Will and I hung out at my house for a while instead.

  That was one of my fonder memories of Will's parents.

  Jesus fucking Christ, I missed him.

  "Dinner's ready." Matt brought over two plates of chicken and rice. "I think I messed up the gravy."

  "I'm sure it's fine." I ruffled his hair as he sat down next to me, and I tucked into dinner while I tried to shake the past. It was too easy to get stuck there, thinking about what-ifs and regrets. "Maybe you should be a chef," I said around a mouthful of food. "You're better than your old man."

  He slanted a crooked grin. "Don't distract me with compliments."

  "I didn’t know I was."

  He rolled his eyes. "You're done changing the topic, is all. 'Cause I had an interesting talk with Brady Calvert today, you know, your old friend's son, and we want some answers about our names."

  Well, fuck.

  Chapter 3

  William Calvert

  "I got your bag." I climbed up the dock first and grabbed Aurora's luggage before extending a hand to her.

  She smiled nervously and let me help her up. My twelve-year-old was anxious about attending her first camp, but I knew very well how it would play out. She would cry and want to go home tonight. By day three, her parents were going to be a distant memory. It was what camp did to kids.

  It'd been years since I last set foot on Big Chinook. Brady had been coming here since he was Aurora's age, and by the time he reached fourteen, he no longer wanted his mother and me to drop him off.

  "They've built another house or two since last time, haven't they?" Lissa joined my side and looked toward the big cabins. "I don’t remember the one next to the main house."

  I squinted. Eight bunkhouses sat in a row in front of a forest, and two of them hadn't been worn by weather, the wood lighter. I nodded in response.

  "Looks like it." I couldn’t quite remember what the camp had been like when Brady attended. What I did remember was the last round of depression kicking my ass at that time. My memories were hazy at best. "Are you ready, princess?" I turned to Aurora, who grabbed my hand.

  It gave my heart a squeeze of warmth. Holding hands became rare once she hit eleven, and now, at almost thirteen, affection toward parents wasn’t "cool." If I'd been alone, crying about it wouldn’t have been unheard of. Instead, I smiled and brought her knuckles to my lips for a chaste kiss.

  We were running late, having missed the ferry with the rest of the camp kids arriving today, but we'd alerted the counselors to say we'd be heading over on our own. We weren't the only ones doing that, and Lissa waved and greeted a family who didn’t live many streets from us. I nodded hello, not interested in getting stuck with chitchat. I had the attention span of a two-year-old for insignificance and became agitated easily.

  "I'll take Aurora," I told Lissa quietly, as she wanted to catch up with the neighbors.

  "Okay, hon." She was already walking over to the woman—I'd forgotten her name.

  Aurora and I walked hand in hand up the dock toward the grassy courtyard with a big campfire area in the middle. Logs of driftwood circled the fire pit, probably as old as I was.

  A breeze blew past, heavy with sea air and pine. I swallowed hard, ridding myself of the memories of better times. Where I had been better.

  "Will you come get me if I don’t wanna stay, Daddy?" Aurora inched closer to me as we neared the camp.

  "You know I will," I said, looking around. It was lunchtime, which explained the lack of kids running around outside. Half a dozen preteens lingered outside the house where the dining hall was. "You remember your promise, right?"

  She sighed and made a face. "Yeah. I'll give it two nights."

  I nodded. "You'll see. When your month is up, your mother and I will have to drag you away, kicking and screaming."

  The youngest children arrived in groups and stayed for a couple weeks. I guessed it was in a moment of bravery and peer pressure from her friends she'd chosen a month.

  Kelly and I had always gone for two months, the longest stay; although, I wasn’t sure that was an option anymore. Kids weren't kids these days the way we were, and the interest for high school seniors to attend camp had cooled off over the years.

  Aurora giggled and snorted. "No way."

  Yes way.

  Remembering the orientation spot behind the main house, I steered Aurora in that direction, passing the counselors' building and a shed that I knew—unless they'd changed it—was where they stored toys, games, and gear for any outdoor activities imaginable.

  We ran into Brady there.

  "Hey!" He looked up from his clipboard and the children he was surrounded by, and he gave Aurora a smirk. "Rory, you're lucky. You won't have me as your counselor."

  She was lucky. Those two knew how to rile each other up.

  It was overwhelming with the number of children being assigned to their bunks, all their questions, several needing comfort for already missing their parents, and now Brady poking fun at Aurora for bringing her stuffed bear. All I wanted was to go back home and close myself into my study.

  "Brady," I warned tiredly.

 
I couldn’t run and hide. I was a parent.

  He let up and grinned. "All right, all right. I have to set a fine effing example, anyway." He turned back to the children of whom he was in charge. "Come on, guys! I'm going to show you your home for the next month."

  *

  Lissa rejoined me around the time Aurora found her group. Her counselor led the way to bunkhouse six, and my daughter threw us a longing look before surrendering herself to camp.

  My wife wiped a tear from her cheek. "I can't believe she'll be a teenager soon. By the way, we have a barbecue with the Nelsons next weekend."

  I let out a breath and sank even deeper. Was that even possible? All this fucking pretending… Barbecues, golf rounds, potlucks, charity functions—I hated all of it, and I wasn’t supposed to, was I? I didn’t deserve to complain.

  "Okay." I swallowed my nausea. I'd keep on pretending.

  "Hey, Dad!"

  I turned toward the sleeping quarters and spotted Brady with his gaggle of children. He was waving me over, so I told Lissa I'd be right back.

  Luckily, the kids left his side to explore.

  I crossed the courtyard and put my hands in my pockets.

  "Everything okay, son?"

  "Yeah." He nodded in the direction of the dock. "I have to pick something up on Little Chinook, and I bet it was ages since you were there. Wanna come and check it out?"

  No. I wanted to go home. "Sure," I replied slowly. I felt worse every time I tried to come up with excuses to get out of things. I remembered a time when taking the boat out and spending the whole day on the water with Brady brought me nothing but joy. In fact, it used to be a personal favorite, along with movie nights with Aurora. "I'll go tell your mother—"

  "She looks busy." He pointed.

  Throwing a glance over my shoulder, I saw Lissa was talking to the Nelsons again.

  "All right, let's go before I have to socialize with them." Some truth slid out of me unbidden. "I already have a barbecue to go to next weekend."

  It made Brady laugh. "I know, right? I don’t get why Mom has to make plans for every damn weekend."

  I wanted to be his friend and confide in him, tell him I didn’t understand that either, though it wasn’t my role to be his buddy. My place was next to Lissa, and she'd always been there for me. She loved get-togethers; I owed it to her to go along with it.