Cash had been bartending here as long as I’d been runnin’ the place, and we’d grown up together. He knew me just about as well as it was possible to know another person. Just like with my brothers it was pointless to try and bullshit my way out of this. Plus, it might be good to talk to someone who didn’t have Comfort blood running through them.
“Sorry. I’m just a little out of sorts after the will reading.”
Cash’s face lost color. He mumbled, “Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Sorry, man. I forgot that was today.”
I shook my head. “No worries. I just figured I’d come by and do some inventory to get my mind off of things.”
“How did it go?” He spoke quietly but firmly. His tone made it clear that he wasn’t gonna be chased off by my mood—if I needed to spill my guts, he was gonna be there to catch ’em. A good friend.
“Hank gets the house. And the bar’s getting split up equally between us.”
“Equally?” Cash’s head tilted to the side. “But there’s three of you.”
“No, there’s four of us.” I knew I could’ve just come right out and said that Cheyenne was back but for some reason I wanted to see if Cash remembered her. Since Cheyenne was my shadow, and Cash and I were always together, the three of us were basically the Three Amigos. He’d been in the kitchen the day my grandparents took her away, but we’d never talked about it.
It took him a minute, but then his eyes widened and his jaw dropped open. “Holy shit. Shadow?!”
“Yep.” I nodded. “Cheyenne.”
“Cheyenne.” He spoke her name reverently as he shook his head back and forth. “I haven’t thought about her in…years. Are you going to try and find her?”
“Nope.” Now I was the one shaking my head.
“You’re not?” His face scrunched in confusion.
“Don’t have to. She’s here.”
“Here? In Firefly?”
“Yep.”
“Have you seen her?”
“She was at the will reading. I didn’t recognize her at first,” I admitted, but omitted part of the reason for my lack of recognition was a woman that had me tied up in more knots than my headphone wires after being loose in the bottom of my gym bag for a week.
“You didn’t?”
“No.” I felt like the world’s biggest asshole for not knowing my own sister, but it was what it was. “She’s not the same little girl in pigtails. She’s an adult.”
“How is she? Where’s she been? What is she doing now?”
I had the same questions, but unfortunately I still had no answers to any of them. “She seemed fine, but we didn’t really get a chance to talk. She’s coming by here tonight, though.”
“Fuck.” His tone was one of disbelief. “That’s crazy.”
My friend had summed it up perfectly. It was crazy.
We worked in silence prepping the bar. That was the nice thing about having a friend like Cash, someone who’d been there through thick and thin, had seen you at both your best and your worst. Who knew you better, in a lot of ways, than you knew yourself. He knew when you needed to talk and when you needed to be left alone with your thoughts.
And right now, those thoughts kept circling back to a dark-haired, blue-eyed, lady lawyer. And since I didn’t really understand what that meant or why it was happening, she wasn’t a topic I felt like discussing.