“You said you lived with her before Mom,” Jasper replied.

Layne kept his eyes locked to his boy.

Layne had made the decision when he moved home that he would treat his sons, mostly, like men. Neither of them were kids anymore, not really, and both of them were smart. They had to learn how to be men from somewhere and Stew sure as f**k wouldn’t teach them how to be good ones, so Layne was going to do it. Therefore, he was straight with them, at all times, at all costs. They had to learn how to deal with whatever life threw at them and no one could tell you how to do that. You had to learn by experience.

Neither of them had asked about him getting shot, not yet. He was going to let them sort what they had to sort in their heads and then he was going to share more about who he was and what he did. That time was getting ripe, he knew it.

Therefore, Layne nodded to Jasper. “I did.”

Jasper got that look in his eye, the one he got when he was going to be more of an ass**le teenaged kid than usual and Layne braced again.

“You like jailbait?”

“Jas,” Tripp muttered. He wasn’t a big fan of his brother’s ass**le teenaged kid act either.

Jasper turned to his brother and defended himself. “She’s four years younger than Dad. They lived together before Mom, she was, like, a teenager, dude.”

Layne held onto his patience and studied his sons.

Then he made a decision.

“Don’t move, I’ll be back,” Layne ordered and walked out of the kitchen, up the stairs and to his desk. He pulled out a drawer, rifled through it and found the big manila envelope. He opened it, his fingers sifting through the pictures, he found the one he was looking for, pulled it out and walked back to his sons.

He resumed his place opposite them at the island and tossed the picture down in front of them. It skidded and Tripp’s hand shot out to stop it. He brushed it with his finger, twirling it so it was right side up to him and Jasper.

In it was a picture of Rocky. She was wearing jeans shorts, a tight pink t-shirt, her hair was down and around her shoulders and she was sitting on a high, cement wall next to a statue of a lion. They were at Purdue, her and Dave and Layne. She was seventeen and scouting universities, she’d later be accepted at Purdue as well as five other schools. She wanted to go to Purdue but she got hooked up with Layne and made the decision to stay closer to home so she’d picked Butler. Layne felt no guilt about this. Butler wasn’t sloppy seconds by a long shot.

Layne had always loved that picture. She’d been smiling, it was a little smile but the dimple in her right cheek had popped out. At seventeen, she’d made it to far beyond pretty, her sitting there, in her tight pink t-shirt, that smile on her face, young, the promise of a good life ahead of her, it was captivating both in person and in the photo. That smile, that t-shirt, her long legs exposed by her jeans shorts, ankles crossed, the promise on her face, it all defined why he’d fallen in love with her. He’d known her three weeks and in that instant, when he snapped that photo, he remembered looking through the lens and he’d lost his heart or, more to the point, gave it to her.

“That was taken about three weeks after we started going out. She was seventeen,” Layne told his boys.

“Wow. She’s pretty,” Tripp mumbled and his head came up to look at his Dad. “But she’s prettier now.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“Seventeen?” Jasper asked, his tone biting. “That’s sick, you were twenty-one.”

Jasper wasn’t wrong either. Twenty and twenty-four was okay, nineteen and twenty-three was still good, anything below that, the guy in his twenties, the girl in her teens, was frowned upon in that ‘burg.

But he didn’t give a f**k then and, thinking about it for the first time in over a decade, he didn’t give a f**k now.

“Look at her Jas,” Layne urged quietly and Jasper held his eyes, Jasper’s belligerent, then he looked down at the photo.

“It’s safe to say, her brother and Dad weren’t all fired up that she caught my eye,” Layne continued. “She was in high school, I’d graduated Ball State and was at the Academy. The first six months I was with her, every date we had happened at her Dad’s house. He wouldn’t even let me put her in my car. He got to know me and that changed. We moved in together a month after she graduated from high school and we lived together for two years.”

He knew Jasper would do the math, he already did. Layne’s son was far from dumb.

Layne carried on. “She went to Butler. She’d drive into Indy every day to go to class, worked at Frank’s as a waitress on the weekends. I worked for the ‘burg’s PD.”

Jasper looked from the photo to him and Layne went on.

“You see her?”

“Yeah, I see her,” Jasper replied.

“Three weeks before that photo was taken, I saw her, took one look at her and I knew. She was it. I didn’t care if she was seventeen. She was it. You want something bad enough, you know it’s right, you know it’ll be worth the wait. So I waited and I was right, Rocky was worth it. Until you two came along, she was the best thing that happened to me in my whole goddamned life.”

Tripp was staring at him, his mouth had dropped open. Jasper was shielding his response.

“Look at that picture, Jasper, and tell me that girl wasn’t worth the wait,” Layne said quietly.

Jasper licked his lips and then sucked them between his teeth.

Layne waited.

Then Jasper showed him that he had broken through.

“I know it because she’s the coolest teacher in school,” Jasper informed him.

“Yeah?” Layne asked, curious, even though he told himself he did not want to know.

“Yeah,” Tripp put in. “She’s like, that Dead Poets Society dude except a lady. She even shows that movie in her class. Kids are always hearing that she’s gettin’ into trouble with the principal because of something she’s done. Half the time, they aren’t even in the classroom but doin’ all sorts of shit all over the school. You get in her class, you got so many field trips, it’s awesome. I hope I get her. She even lets kids read comic strips for credit.”

Yes, another indication that Rocky was a nut.

“You have her yet?” Layne asked Jasper.

“Had her when I was a sophomore and she was awesome so I’m takin’ Advanced English Lit next semester. I hope I get her because Mr. Halsey is a moron,” Jasper replied.