Quarter sister? What did you call it when your father made a fourth child with yet another woman? No matter how they were related, Storm was literally a baby, one who had crapped all over a boardroom table and, metaphorically, all over their lives.
The reading of Wilf’s will had forced Logan to accept that his father was genuinely dead, and that he would never get to tell him what he really thought of him.
Maybe that was for the best, since what Logan thought kept changing. As the gravity of Dad’s finances had piled up, so had Logan’s acrimony. It had reached critical mass when they’d been forced to fly up here to Raven’s Cove, a tiny island among many in the middle of the BC coast.
Traipsing around the collection of buildings they had called home throughout their childhood, they had discovered things were far, far worse here than the lawyers and accountants in Victoria had warned. The house they’d grown up in was showing its age. Wilf’s almost wife, Tiffany, had started making updates, but the renovation had been halted mid-construction due to nonpayment of invoices.
It was the same story at the lodge where sports fishermen had always filled the utilitarian rooms, topping up the company coffers while they caught their limit. Tiffany had talked Wilf into upgrading the whole resort, hoping to draw higher-end visitors and ecotourism.
She was trying to gentrify a truck stop roadhouse on the otherwise desolate West Coast. Raven’s Cove was a place to gas up, restock the galley, or get an emergency repair. Plenty of summer traffic was leisure craft, sure, but they were headed to more populous places like Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii, and farther north to Alaska.
Raven’s Cove’s lifeblood was commercial fishing vessels or other working boats. No one flew this far for a family vacation that didn’t offer roller coasters or white sand beaches. There were more accessible places to go whale watching.
Tiffany seemed to have taken an “if you build it” attitude, but who knew what she had been thinking? She had lost her life in the same plane crash.
Logan and his brothers had flown here to Raven’s Cove expecting to use the days leading up to their father’s service to prepare this place for sale and extract an inheritance—not for themselves, but for their sister.
Wilf had given each of his sons money for school when they had left for university. They’d all used it wisely. Logan had expected Wilf to use his own money wisely, not throw it away on costly upgrades that left the whole place under water.
Selling Raven’s Cove it wouldn’t cover it’s debts. No, they had to bring this place back into the black so they could sell it at a profit or there would be nothing for Storm’s upbringing and head start as an adult. There was no one to physically look after her, either. Aside from the three of them, she had a nanny who trembled more than a Chihuahua on a frosty morning, and an absent aunt who may or may not be in trouble with the law.
Logan didn’t know how they would turn this place around and find her a guardian, only that it had to be done. That overwhelming reality was sitting like radioactive waste in his stomach.
Of course, that curdled sensation might also be the cheap scotch and IPA chasers he’d downed last night. Or the guilt baked into hating a man who was beloved by all the people who had stuck around and spent time with him.
Logan passed Moody, the short order cook, heading into the pub. He also looked worse for wear after last night, stubbled and heavy-lidded, but he smiled and waved. Last night, Moody had told Logan that Wilf had paid for him to go to Rupert for some much-needed dental work last year. Quinley, one of the servers, said Wilf had covered the consultation fee for a divorce lawyer, when her ex-husband had tried to move their kids to Nova Scotia.
Umi was coming out of the coffee shop as Logan passed it.
“Morning.” She waved and turned into the first door on the marina building, heading up the stairs inside to the resort office where she ran accounting. She had told them that Wilf had paid her salary without interruption, even when her pregnancy complications had forced her onto bedrest.
Randy, the apprentice marine mechanic, was opening the hardware store that fronted the machine shop. He had screwed up his dates and missed an exam, nearly putting his certification back a semester. Wilf had paid the fee to write the makeup test and arranged for him to get back to Nanaimo to do it.
Everyone seemed to have a story like that, and they had all been eager to share them with Logan and his brothers. Maybe they had thought it would help with the grief, but mostly they left Logan feeling more infuriated with his father than ever.
Wilf had always been a spendthrift. He had wanted to be loved, so he had purchased affection. How could they not see that? If he was so compassionate, how had he been so stupidly thoughtless so many times to the people he was supposed to love?
As he rounded the corner of the marina building and looked at the boatyard in the watery light of morning, all Logan saw was the giant mess that Wilf had left, one that he and his brothers would have to clean up.
Oh Christ. He wasn’t going to make it upstairs to the marina office. He’d only had coffee, but it refused to stay down. Better to lose it out here, rather than inside.
He hurried behind the brick building and leaned a hand against a tree trunk while he retched out all sorts of poor life decisions.
Above him, where the road rose up the bank toward the one-room schoolhouse, a young voice asked, “Are you okay?”
This was why he loathed this town. It wasn’t even a town. It was a hundred and fifty people living cheek by jowl in a cluster of houses around a marina. The military had built this place on First Nations land during World War II, to service the navy. It was still the only place to repair a boat within a day’s sail from anywhere. Nobody wanted to be here. If your boat broke down, you were stuck here. It shouldn’t be a sentence, but for most it was.
Not him, though. Nope. No way. He was giving it one week. That’s all.
Please let it only be one week.
“I’m fine,” he lied, spitting and straightening to look up at the boy of seven or eight. He wore a blue raincoat with dinosaur skeletons on it, rubber boots, and a red backpack.
“My mom gives me ginger ale when I’m sick. Do you want some?”
“You got some in your backpack?” Something in the kid’s big, earnest eyes tickled a memory in Logan’s chest.
“No.” He chuckled. “I can go to the store for you.”
“Thanks, but I’m not sick. I’m suffering the consequences of my actions.” A cold ginger ale sounded amazing, though.
“I thought you were having a hangover.”
“I do have a hangover. How do you know what a hangover is?”
“My grandpa has one. Mom is really mad.”
Oh shit. Now he was going to retch for an entirely different reason.
Those eyes. He knew those eyes way too well. And that helpful personality, the one that wanted to take care of him. His entire youth and a very hot angry week in his early twenties had been cushioned by big brown eyes exactly like those ones.
A piledriver had arrived to pound the knowledge into the back of his screaming skull, reminding him that yesterday was not the worst day of his life. That would be today, but he still asked with faint hope, “Who’s your grandpa, little man?”
“Arthur Marshall.”
“Thought so. I was drinking his scotch last night.” He regretted it even more now.
“Is that like butterscotch? Is it good?”
