Everything was going fine until he ran into his sister.
He had just come out of the supermarket with a cart loaded with groceries hastily dumped into cardboard boxes for easier transport when an all-too-familiar voice shouted, "Eren! Hey, Eren! Baby brother!"
Eren thought about pretending he hadn't heard, then plastered a grin on his face and turned to see his sister coming toward him along with Tor's mate, Bernie.
Like everyone else in the family, Inga was tall and fair, a towering blonde Amazon with a sunny disposition who had proven herself capable of outrunning, out-fishing, and out-arm-wrestling every boy in town by the time she was fourteen. Bernie, in contrast, was much smaller, pink-cheeked with a halo of curly brown hair—and enormously pregnant.
Eren had been a little nervous being around Bernie lately because he couldn't remember her exact due date and he wasin no wayprepared to be part of the process if she actually had her baby on his watch.
"Heya!" Inga punched him cheerfully and painfully in the shoulder. "I thought for a minute there you were going to ignore us!"
I thought so too, but no such luck."Of course not," he said. "What are you two doing here?"
"Shopping for baby things," Bernie said, holding up her shopping bags.
"Is Tor here too?" Eren hoped not; Tor was the one out of the group of them who was most likely to catch Eren in a lie about where he was taking the groceries.
Bernie turned even pinker. "No, he's back at the lighthouse, working on the baby's room." Tor and Bernie lived in a converted lighthouse and the adjacent former keeper's house.
"That's wonderful," Eren said. "I mean, good for you two, getting out and getting some shopping done."
"Bernie drove me in," Inga said. "She's getting baby stuff and I'm picking up a few things you can't get at the store in town." She prodded at his boxes of groceries. "Except apparently you forgot to mention thatyouwere going to be in the big city too. I thought you were out fishing."
"I am," Eren said. He bristled with an urge to throw his arm over the shopping cart and stop his sister's snooping. "I just needed some things from town."
"A lot of things. What are youdoingout on that boat?" She peeled up the flap of a cardboard box. "Oh, some of this is for the house too, right? You're not planning to eat a whole case of frozen hamburger all by yourself!"
"I am if I eat it as a bear," Eren growled, tugging the cart away from her.
Inga folded her arms. "You're doing the thing again."
"What thing?" Eren demanded.
"The thing where you get weird and secretive over perfectly normal things for no reason. You're acting like I broke into your room and started reading your diary just because I'm looking at the groceries that you bought with household money."
"I bought them withmymoney, and I don't have a diary."
"What's going on here, Eren?" She poked at the groceries again. "There's what, five or six loaves of bread here? Three dozen eggs? This can't all be for you. You live with us."
Eren hated lying to his sister, but if he was going to keep a secret that he had sworn to protect with his life, he had to. "There's a family along the coast who asked me to pick them up some things in town," he said between his teeth. "I didn't want you to know. All right?"
Inga, as he had known she would, melted immediately.
"You big softie," she said. She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. "Eren, I'm sorry for being a snoop. It's just that you never tell us anything anymore, not since you got back from the service. I thought for a minute that you might be hiding a secret mate and kid out there somewhere." She searched his face anxiously with her blue eyes. "You'd tell us if that was the case, right?"
"It's definitely not that," Eren said. His annoyance softened a little. "I didn't mean to worry you, but right now I need to get all of this back to the boat before everything starts to thaw, okay?"
"And I need to sit down before my feet fall off," Bernie said. She grabbed Inga's elbow. "Come on, you said there was a coffee shop around here somewhere that we needed to try." Over her shoulder she told Eren, "Get on with your day, and I'm sorry she's such a snoop!"
"He's my brother, I have a right to be a snoop!"
"This way, Snoopy," Bernie told her, pushing her along.
Eren hurried off to the truck with the groceries before anyone else got any more ideas about asking him questions. He threw the boxes into the back. When he looked around, Inga and Bernie had vanished into the coffee shop.
Eren ran his fingers through his short blond hair, growing out of its former military cut.
The worst part was that Inga wasn't wrong. Hehadbeen keeping secrets from his family. Justifiable secrets, in his opinion. Secrets that were not just his to keep.