“They give you hooks?”
“No, they’re these plastic things. Works the same.”
“That’s great, Grady.”
Grady led his brother down the stone path until they came to a koi pond. They sat on the bench, both watching the fish swim around and the water cascade over the edge of the statue to create a waterfall.
“I was surprised to see Rennie in my hospital room.”
“She wanted to be there. She spent the first weekend you were in a coma at the hospital with Mom and me. As soon as the police showed up, she intervened and told them you had a lawyer. She’s the one who set everything up to get you this help and try to keep you out of jail.”
“How come you never married her? Or the one I met the time I visited?”
What a loaded question that was. Graham could make up some story and tell his brother how sometimes things didn’t always work out, or he could tell him the truth. Graham sighed, kicked his feet out in front of him, and relaxed against the bench. If he was going to do this, he was going to be comfortable.
“Monica, she’s the one you met. After Austin’s funeral, I went back to Cali and asked her to move to Cape Harbor with me. She said no, and I really couldn’t blame her. As far as Rennie goes, up until Brooklyn’s return, I hadn’t seen or heard from her. Found out she’s been living in Seattle for some time but kept her distance out of respect for Brooklyn.”
“You should’ve stayed in California, Graham.”
“Hindsight, Grady. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Grady chuckled. “Hindsight . . . what if I stopped Austin? How different would things be now?”
Graham was a master at the what-if game. “Okay, let’s play this game,” he told Grady. They had nothing but time to waste, so why not? “Let’s say that night never happens. I stay in California, marry Monica. We probably have kids, and I probably work fifty to sixty hours a week.”
“Or?” Grady responded.
Graham laughed. “You’re sadistic. Or, Monica and I don’t work out, and I marry Rennie.”
“Option two sounds more like it. I never understood why the two of you weren’t together.”
Graham didn’t know, either, but their future looked promising. “Yeah,” Graham sighed. “Now, to you. Where do you think you’d be?”
Grady shrugged. “Right before the accident, I was going to ask Monroe if she wanted to go out on a date.”
“She cares about you, Grady.”
“I don’t want her to. She needs to move on and stop trying to fix me.”
Easier said than done, Graham thought. “You can tell her,” Graham said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with that conversation.”
Grady laughed. “She’s persistent, and I love her as a friend, but she’s the past, and I don’t want to keep living in the past.”
Grady’s words gave Graham pause. Was that what he was doing with Rennie? Living in the past? Trying to rekindle what they had because it was good then? He hadn’t thought about it, but it made sense. He knew nothing of her life now other than she lived and worked in Seattle and that her boyfriend of over a year was married. Everything about Rennie and Graham came from the past.
Graham didn’t want to think about his relationship with Rennie, at least not right now. “Have you given any thought to what you want to do when you leave here?”
“Assuming I’m not going to jail?” Grady asked his brother, who nodded. “I’ll have to talk to Brooklyn, but I think I’d like to get the company up and running again.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’d need her permission because she’s the majority owner. Well, Brystol is, but she’s underage, so I have to go through Brooklyn. I wouldn’t be able to have a big crew or anything until I had some capital.” He shrugged. “Maybe she’ll give me a loan to start with.”
“You sure you can go out to sea?” Graham was concerned about PTSD. As far as he knew, his brother hadn’t been on a boat since the night of the accident.
“I’m working through some things here. I have to try, at least.”
Graham agreed, and he liked Grady’s idea a lot. “Let me know when you want to talk to Brooklyn. I’ll go with you. And if you need a couple guys to go out on the boat, I can help. Fishing really wasn’t my thing, but I can do it.”
“You sure?”
He was. Graham wanted to support his brother in any way he could, and if that meant putting on a pair of hip waders and getting up when normal people were sound asleep, he would do it. He had done it today to visit Grady.
Graham spent the better part of the morning hanging out with his brother. He left around lunchtime and made the trek back to Cape Harbor with a lot on his mind. His thoughts focused mostly on Rennie. He loved her, there was no doubt about that, but he couldn’t reason if his feelings were new or residual from the life they had before things changed for them and their friends. It made sense that he wanted to be with her. She made him laugh, and she had been his best friend, but there was a time when he chose someone else over her, which had to mean something. He just didn’t know what. They had spent an amazing weekend together, although, under the circumstances, their feelings could be vastly different because of the situation they found themselves in. It could be Graham and Rennie were destined to be friends with the occasionally added benefit of sex, except Graham wanted more, and he needed to figure out if Rennie would be the one to move forward with in his life plan or not.