Grandpa. That’s him,” I confirmed, wincing at the squeakiness in my voice.
Lord, he was breathing in and out through his nose already. I needed to get this over with, quick, quick, quick. Now.
“I didn’t think I would ever see him again,” I started to explain. “I tried reaching out to him over and over again but never heard back. I just thought he didn’t want to have anything to do with… us.” Maybe that comment didn’t help, but… it was the truth.
Jonah hadn’t bothered trying to call, period. If he really wanted to get in contact with me, he would have found a way. He would have found someone to pass a message along. He could have called me from a different number. He could have set up a fake account and messaged me. There was always a fucking way if you needed or wanted something. Always.
And since reappearing, there had been breaks in his schedule. Bye-weeks. He’d had opportunities. But there had been fucking nothing.
Instead, all I had gotten were those four random postcards at first.
Grandpa’s fingers flexed around my phone, and I watched as his mouth opened to stretch his jaw and then closed. Fuck. I knew, I knew, he was seconds away from losing his shit.
“Who else knows?” Even his voice was hoarse. Just five minutes ago, he’d been hiding behind the couch, trying to scare the hell out of me, and now he was trying to sound like Batman. Before I could answer, he shot out another question. “Why are you telling me now?”
Now or never.
“Peter knows. I told Luna earlier. We talked about it—no. Calm down. Quit getting riled up. Your face is getting red, and you know it looks ugly when it gets red,” I told him, hoping teasing him would work.
It didn’t. I’d lost him. I could tell.
“And I’m telling you because he showed up at Maio House,” I rushed, but it was useless.
The old man shot up to his feet, his face hitting tomato red. “He’s not getting anywhere near—”
I sighed and grabbed the leg of his olive pants. “Calm. Down. Jesus, Grandpa—”
“Calm down?” he shouted, making me roll my eyes.
“Yeah, calm down. You’re about to burst a blood vessel, and I’m not driving you to urgent care if you do.”
Yeah, he wasn’t calming down. He wasn’t calming down at all. The redness was creeping down his throat. I knew I had to keep going. “And you know that’s not fair for you to say that. I don’t want him around either, but I’m not going to be the jerk here, and you’re not either,” I said to him, hoping he could hear the reason in my words because, surprisingly, saying those words hadn’t been as hard as I would have expected.
They were the truth. They were a necessity. I had to keep going. “If he wants to be here and is going to be responsible and do what he should have been doing, then he has every right—”
All right, that sentence had been hard as hell, but not as hard as the choke Grandpa Gus let out.
The drama queen, who was red from his hairline down to his neck, threw his hands up over his head. “Right my—”
I had to set my burrito down, knowing I wasn’t going to get any more in my belly anytime soon and curled my fingers tighter into his pant leg because I already knew he was about to start stomping around the room if I let him. “He does, and you know it. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it is what it is,” I tried to reason. “You know you’d be telling me the same thing right now if we were talking about anybody other than your best little buddy, and you know that.”
His best little buddy and my best little buddy. The best thing in my life. The best thing, period.
Grandpa Gus started shaking his head the second the fourth word was out of my mouth. If I thought I was stubborn, this man was the original outbreak monkey. I should have brought him a cannoli too to blackmail him into behaving. Too late now.
“No. Stop shaking your head, nothing is changing. He’s here, and he deserves to be. We can’t force him to leave.” I didn’t want him to stay, but this wasn’t about me either, was it? No, but…. “He can stay if he wants to do the right thing. If not….” I held my hands up