Page 14 of Sometimes You Stay

Until recently.

Not that his bunnies and cow were strictly considered wildlife. But over the last few years, Finn had brought in a few strays.

As he slid the door open and stepped into the dim light, one of those strays greeted him with a low moo.

“Hey, Roberta.” Finn strolled across the tidy cement floor and patted the black-and-white former milk cow between the eyes. Or rather, beside her lone eye. The vet had had to remove the other thanks to a nasty infection. A permanentreminder of her previous living conditions. “Got enough to eat there?”

The old girl mooed again, contentedly chewing on her hay. But his question seemed to set off decidedly less satisfied calls from every other corner of the floor. The three goats in the next pen bleated like an entire herd. The dogs barked like they’d been starving for days. Even the rabbits in his homemade hutch chirped especially loud.

The cacophony nearly made him miss the ring of his phone, but the vibration in his back pocket made him jump. He jerked the phone free, flipped it open, and pressed it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Finnegan.” The deep voice needed no introduction, but he offered one anyway. “It’s your dad.”

Finn smiled as he tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder so he could grab a pallet of hay for the goats. “This is a surprise.”

“I thought you might be feeding.”

“I am.”

His dad offered a throaty chuckle. “Your mother always says I have perfect timing.”

Finn offered an obligatory laugh. They both knew his mother said no such thing. Never had. Thomas Chaffey was notoriously late, and only Bea Chaffey’s sainthood had kept them married for nearly thirty-five years.

“What’s up?” Finn asked as he opened the gate and stepped into the goat enclosure. Jenna immediately ran to him, butting her head against his legs to get at the meal in his hands. Her two kids kept their distance, prancing in the far corner and eyeing him with their strange horizontal pupils.

“Your mother heard there was an accident at the harbortoday. Aretha Franklin just called from the Bahamas. She heard it from Kathleen, who heard it from ... well, never mind. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. A tourist fell in the harbor. And it was kind of my fault.”

With the mama goat adequately distracted by fresh hay, he strolled toward the kids, who tried to escape to the small pasture behind their pen. If not for the locked gate, they would have been long gone. Squatting before them, he slowly held out his hand to let them investigate it. Not even a month old, they still wobbled a little on their spindly legs, but they were definitely warming up to him, seeing as he’d been supplementing their feeding with daily bottles of milk.

“Kind of?”

His dad’s delayed question made him jump and nearly lose his balance. Swaying to stay upright, he scared off the kids, who staggered toward their mother for their own dinner.

Finn pushed off his knees and stood slowly. “She bumped into me. Actually, she sort ofbouncedoff of me.”

His dad said nothing, but Finn had no problem picturing his questioning eyebrows.

Finn dumped out the goats’ water tub and scrubbed it clean with the brush that hung from a nail on the back wall. “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I was just taking Joe Jr. for a walk—”

His dad snorted a laugh. “Enough said.”

“He’s not that bad, Dad. He’s just...” Finn chewed on his lip as he searched for the right description for his sidekick. The dog had always been just a little bit off. While the rest of his litter had been easy to train, Joe had been a big goofy pup. And he’d grown into a big goofy dog.

His dad probably knew by now that there weren’t exact words for Joe, so he asked only, “Is the girl all right?”

“Uh ... mostly. Physically. Her stuff is ruined, though. But I set her up at the Red Door. Marie is taking care of her until we can figure it out.”

“You’re going to help her get her gear sorted?”

“Yeah. I’ll check in on her tomorrow. I’ll make sure she can get whatever she needs.” Assuming those electronics weren’t as much as the new tractor he’d been eyeing or the expansion on the barn he’d been dreaming of, he’d be willing to cover the cost of replacements. Not that she was likely to let him. She’d been pretty stuck on paying Marie for a simple lunch. But at least he could offer.

“Good man.”

Finn rubbed at his chest, right over the center of the warmth that spread through him. It didn’t matter that he was thirty-three. His dad’s approval still mattered.

“So, how’s the new litter?”

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