I reel back and nearly hit my head on the wall. “Excuse me?!”
Jace frowns. “Weren’t you working on the Jessop property yesterday?” he asks. “I heard you had the whole place in a cloud of dust. You ever heard of a weekend?”
Oh. Yeah, he’s talking about the labor you put in clearing out tiles, Lizzie. Not your newly found sex life.
“Right, yeah, I did—we did, I mean. Caleb was pretty ruthless gutting the place.”
“Hmm, maybe that’s it,” Jace muses, leaning to peek around the wall. I know he’s staring at Caleb when he smiles and wiggles his fingers at him.
“Maybe that’s what?” I ask.
“I was thinking he looks different today. More relaxed. I figured it was living with you, but maybe it’s just him releasing all that sexual frustration on your house.”
On my house… Yeah…
I decide not to correct him on that.
“He looks the same to me. Jace, if that's all you needed, I need to—”
“You might notice it more if you’d known him before,” Jace says, still frowning out onto the forecourt.
“Before?” I shuffle around him, set on making my way back outside. Caleb had wanted to get to Gatlinburg by ten at the latest.
“Yeah. He seems lighter. Brighter. More like his brother, actually.”
That brings me up short. I practically hear my sneakers squeak on the concrete.
“Brother?”
“You didn’t know he had a brother?”
Memory of the previous weekend surfaces. Caleb had been talking to his mom, trying to convince her that her ‘boys’ hadn’t needed her help. Boys, plural. What was the name she had used? Matthew?
“I’d heard,” I say, frowning in thought. Hadn’t Caleb said something about how he wasn’t here? Had he moved away?
“Matty was a few years older than Caleb. Good guy. Easy-going and friendly. Kinda your classic big brother hero to Caleb. To a lot of us, really.”
“Was…” I repeat back. “As in, past tense?”
I feel a familiar squeezing around my heart when Jace nods. His eyes are far away, looking into the past.
“Yeah, he passed a while back. Caleb and I were still in high school. We had a storm. Not even a big one really, but the rain was torrential. The river rose and Matty got caught in it. Took days to find him.”
“My God…”
Jace shakes his head, takes a deep breath, and shrugs away the sorrow.
“Anyway. It’s old news. Everyone around here knows what happened so I figured you might as well. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Ellie’s illness, I think most of us would have been able to move on a little better. Kinda hard to grieve a friend when his mother keeps thinking he’s around.”
“Yeah.” I can understand that being particularly hard. But my thoughts are more with Caleb. What must it be like when it was your brother?
Just what had Caleb gone through all these years? Reliving his brother’s death over and over, every time he had to explain it to his mom?
“We’re going to see Ellie today.”
“We?” Jace seems surprised.
“Yeah, I thought…” I swallow. “I thought maybe I could be a bit of solidarity for Caleb. But now I just think maybe I’ve stumbled all over something I didn’t wholly understand.”