Page 38 of Rhodes

"Coco's none of your business."

"It's a little my business. I'm the one who has to visit you here when you die at that desk."

He closes the laptop halfway. "She's in Sonoma, doing some girls’ wine weekend with her friends. Happy?"

There he is, under the mask. Ridge in a silent house doesn't rest. He relocates. I almost let him off the hook for it.

"Calling me to come to your place to watch a game and drink a beer would have been a much better way to hang out with your favorite baby brother," I say with a smirk.

"This isn't a social call, Rhodes."

"Whatever this is, it couldn't have waited until Monday? You dragged me downtown on a Saturday, so let's get to it. I have beers to drink."

His face doesn't move much, but the joke drains out of the room before I finish landing it.

Three weeks of you-and-me-need-to-sit-down, and now here we are, the whole floor cleared out, nobody left to overhear anything. Something I thought I'd killed off a long time ago sits up in my chest and starts building a version of what he's going to ask of me.

"I wasn't putting this in an email," he says. "And I didn't want to talk about it when everyone's at the office. That's why I was hoping you'd stick around on Friday."

He slides the folder across the desk. The sound of it, paper dragging over wood in a dead-still room, grates on my nerves.

"What is it?" I ask, not reaching for it.

"Vin's estate cleared probate."

The name slices through me, and I go still before I decide to. My hands stop, my legs stop, the ache in them stops mattering. Vin. The man who was as much a part of my life as my own father, and who betrayed me by making me care for him at all.

"How does Vin have an estate? I thought you and Wells stripped him of everything? And what the fuck does this have to do with me, anyway? I don't want to hear his name."

Wells, another older brother who is a cyber genius and can find anything a man has ever touched, is the reason we know what Vin did at all.

He handed Ridge every account and every address, suggested that stripping him of everything was better than killing him. Ridge ultimately agreed, and the decision was made without input from any of the rest of us. Taking all of his dignity and money, and leaving him to live out his life alone, was the better revenge, according to my brother. I still disagree.

Vin was the closest thing to a father figure I had when I was very young, spending time with me after my mom died and when my own father buried himself in work in his grief. He taught me to love engines and how to talk to girls. He gave me my first beer.

Then he had my father tied to a chair in a dirty warehouse and executed over greed and power.

"We took everything, but missed the car he kept in an old garage across the river. The car wasn't ever titled, and he paid for the garage in advance for twenty years, so it didn't show up on anything," Ridge says, flat, no warning in it and no cushion. "He left you the Corvette."

I don't say anything.

Not looking at it is worse than looking, so I pull the folder toward me. The paper's dry under my fingers, cheap and stiff, and I flip it open. There it is, typed in the middle of a paragraph full of legal words that don't mean anything.

One (1) 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, Marina Blue.

The abstract words turn into a thing, into a car I know down to the bones. We worked on that car over years. I specifically remember the summer when I was ten or eleven, the whole thing spread across a garage floor in pieces I could name with my eyes shut, fenders up on sawhorses.

There was one bolt on the passenger side that would not break loose no matter what we tried, and Vin handed me a longer breaker bar and told me to lean into it, that I had more than I thought.

When the engine caught the first time, my chest did something I didn't have a word for as a boy. That's where I caught my love of tinkering and rebuilding, and it's still with me.

The wanting arrives before the thought does, and I hate it. I hate that it's there.

"Before letting you know, I made sure it was there and found out about the prepaid rent," Ridge says. "It's an old garage across the river."

He sets a key on the desk, a small metallic click against the wood.

I'm going to tell him to sell it, put it on the street in the warehouse district for someone to steal it, or take it to a scrapyard. That's what my mouth's built to do. But what comes out is sideways.