Page 51 of Be My Baby

Amassive crackof thunder rent the air, rattling the glass in Simon’s living room windows. Max jumped a little and yanked the TV cord from the wall. Simon had a fancy surge-protection power board, but he’d never liked the idea of leaving sensitive equipment plugged in during bad weather.

He prowled toward the large sidelight panel next to the front door and scraped a hand through his already dishevelled hair and eyeballed the dark, ominous sky.

How ridiculous. A storm at eight in the morning.

This having nothing to do all day was starting to drive him insane. He couldn’t even get out into the garden right now, with this storm heading in.

He’d helped with what he could at the Cow, but there’d been nothing but ash and twisted metal and a few random things that had survived. Nothing worth keeping.

Nothing to show that he’d spent a decade between its walls.

There was only so much Gabe had for him to do at this time of year. Even Ryan didn’t need him other than for a few hours here and there. His father’s place was a well-oiled machine, and now that he wasn’t running his own animals anymore, all that needed doing there was to keep it clean. Max had mowed the damned place three times in two weeks, his father threatening to disown him if he did it again before it had time to grow more than a centimetre.

He hadn’t seen a lot of Millie. He knew she was trying to give him space, and was grateful for her thoughtfulness, but in all honesty he wouldn’t have minded her calming presence around a little more.

Every time he thought of her, his stomach tumbled. Grew tight and made him wish for things he’d long ago given up on.

“Just face it, you love her.”

He did. And he needed to tell her. For so long he’d felt such intense guilt about it, then he’d realised that loving more than one person wasn’t a crime. It might have been different had Lucy lived. They’d tried so hard, had seen so many different doctors that their heads had spun; if she’d lived he would’ve been a happy man for the rest of his life. Luce had come to mean that much to him. She’d become his sun and moon.

But shehadn’tlived. And his previous love for Millie had slowly rekindled, their shared grief for the woman they’d both loved tying them even closer than before.

Max sat down on the lounge chair, swiped his phone and tapped on his email app. He sipped the coffee he’d placed on the table in front of him while he waited for it to open. The fire investigators had sent through their report, fairly quickly according to Harry, and he’d sent it off to the insurance company a few days ago. Since then, he’d begun obsessively checking his emails for a response.

Now that the shock of what had happened that night had worn off, he was itching to get started rebuilding.

Was it really only two weeks ago?

He’d spoken to Evangeline Adams, a local architect who worked in nearby Bialga with Isaac Forster, running his small but successful design firm, and she’d agreed they had enough information with the old blueprints, and his memory to fill in the gaps, to move ahead with planning to rebuild.

As if he’d conjured them by thinking about it, a notification stared up at him from the insurance company themselves.

“That was fast,” he murmured as he tapped it to open the email.

“Dearblah… We regret to inform you…” Max trailed off and stared unseeing at the rest of the letter.

Regret to inform you?

He blinked a few times and frowned, sure he was reading the email wrong. Then he checked the salutation.

Maybe they’d sent the wrong person’s email to him by accident?

Nope.His name and property information were there at the top.

His breath shortened and his hands started to shake as he forced himself to read further down the page.

By the time he’d finished, he was gasping for air.

He vaguely registered a pair of bare feet in front of him, then his brother’s face before his own.

“Max! Breathe, dude. Just breathe.”

Simon’s barely controlled alarm pierced his fog, his panicked voice far higher pitched than normal.

“Come on, work with me here. Don’t freak out on me now!”

Max sucked in a deep breath, only registering enough to follow orders at this point.

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