Loving those words almost as much as the filthy phrases she’d groaned in my ear last night, I grinned. “You’re my best friend too.” My smile slipped as I remembered something important that I needed to talk to her about. I sat up on the bed and leaned my back against the wall. Gibson mimicked me while Onnika crawled into my lap. “There’s something we should probably talk about…”

Hearing the seriousness in my tone made Anna frown. “What?”

With a sigh, I let it all out. “I’m overdrawn, up to my eyeballs in debt, and now, I’m unemployed. Financially, I’m pretty much fuc…” Glancing at Gibson and Onnika, I changed what I was about to say. “I’m in a corner.”

My attempt to consciously not swear around my children made Anna smile. “You mean we’re in corner. Teammates, remember?” With a smile, I nodded, but Anna frowned. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m so far behind on payments…I don’t know how to catch up, even if I did get another good-paying job, but that seems unlikely, since Dad hooked me up with that last one. I’ll have to start at the bottom…”

Anna nodded; her face was a mixture of annoyance and resignation. There were long-term consequences to my actions that we were all going to have to deal with. When the moment of silence stretched long enough, Gibson filled up the quiet with tales about her dolls’ lives. After listening to her daughter for a while, Anna sighed. “Well, Griff, I only see one solution. You’re not going to like it, but I don’t see another way.”

Having a tiny idea what she was going to say made me cringe. I wanted to argue before she even said it, but instead I made myself ask, “What’s your idea?”

“We go to the guys and beg for a loan.” An inadvertent groan escaped me. Yep. There wasn’t one word in that sentence I liked, and there were several I hated—like “beg.” Maybe expecting an argument from me, Anna raised a finger in the air. When I didn’t say anything, she added, “And I think it’s only right if we pay them back double what we borrow.”

I knew she in part wanted to repay them that much to teach me a lesson, so I shut my mouth and nodded. She was right anyway. I’d feel a lot better borrowing from the band if they made a profit from it. Of course, it was going to take me six hundred years to pay them back. “Okay. I’ll ask them today. Liam asked me to come listen to their first real rehearsal. Moral support.” I shrugged and acted like it didn’t bother me, but it did. Watching Liam take over my spot was going to suck on so many levels, but he was my brother, and he’d asked me to be there, and I couldn’t say no to him.

Nodding, Anna cupped my face in sympathy. She knew I was hurting, but she also knew I’d get through this. Not being in a band anymore wasn’t going to kill me. Los Angeles had taught me that. I was tougher than I thought, and with Anna by my side, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.

The guys were meeting in the late afternoon. Anna had the day off, so she and the girls went with me. We drove Anna’s car, a clunky ancient Ford Escort hatchback that a coworker had sold to her for nine hundred dollars. We used to spend that much on coffee in a month, but now Anna had to make payments to her friend to swing it. I wasn’t sure which reality felt more surreal to me, the one I used to have or the one I had now.

Being back in Washington was so refreshing that I actually enjoyed the drive to Kellan’s place. The seasons were changing, and it was cold, wet, windy, and gloomy, but I loved it. Even though I’d spent most of my life in California, Washington felt like home. I supposed that was because of the people though. Anna and the guys…they made the place feel complete.

When we arrived at Kellan’s gate, I lowered the window and pressed the call button. Kellan had a camera on the gate, so he knew it was me when he answered. “Hey, Griff. How’s it going it, man? What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

It was only then that I realized I probably should have cleared my arrival with the rest of the guys before just showing up. “Oh, uh, Liam asked me to be here today. That okay?”

Kellan’s tinny voice laughed. Me asking permission for anything was not something he was used to. “Of course. You’re always welcome here, Griffin.”

Even as he said it, the gate started swinging open. I only told him, “Thank you,” but in my head I doubted his words. I was positive that there had been quite a bit of time right after I’d abandoned the guys where they wouldn’t have let me anywhere near them, let alone inside their houses.

When I got to the parking lot at the base of the hill Kellan’s house sat on, I started laughing. Kellan had done something about my many complaints about the number of steps that led up to his front door. There was a ski lift gondola resting on a track next to the countless steps. Eager to try it out, I grabbed Onnika while Anna let Gibson out of the car. The four of us easily fit inside the gondola. Gibson spotted the up button and pressed it before I could get to it. Something clicked on the machine, and it slowly started rising. “Now this is more like it,” I said to Anna, as I relaxed back on the railing and let the car do all the heavy lifting.

The car stopped in a space cut out of the front porch, so we didn’t even have to walk up the porch steps. Kellan was waiting near the front door with an amused expression on his face. I gave him my seal of approval. “That’s freaking awesome, man. Good job.”

He laughed as he clapped my back. “I thought you’d appreciate that.”

I laughed, then told him, “I want to take the buggy back down though.”

Gibson heard me and her hand shot into the air. “Me too, me too!”

Kellan grinned at her, then tilted his head inside the house. “Come on, the guys are waiting.”

My heart started hammering as we walked through Kellan’s place. I needed to ask the guys a huge favor, but I didn’t feel like I deserved for them to say yes. I mean, I’d bailed on them, why should they do anything for me? But I’d tried to make amends by helping make their show to replace me a national sensation, although I’d done that more for me than for them, so again, I didn’t really deserve their help.

When we walked into the living room, Anna asked Kellan where Kiera and Ryder were. “The girls and I will hang out with them so you boys have time to do your thing.”

Kellan gave her a smooth grin. “It’s okay. They’re actually in the rehearsal room.”

That surprised me some, but then I figured they were just having a welcome-to-the-family party for Liam. I bit back the sudden pain of loss and focused on the task at hand. Be there for Liam, ask the guys for help, then go about getting a job. That was my to-do list today.

Walking out of the living room, we headed out back to where the rehearsal room was on the other side of the pool. When we got there, I saw about three dozen balloons in bright colors on either sides of the doors. Gibson made a beeline for them, and Onnika struggled to get down. I kept a firm hold on her though. Over the door was a banner proclaiming Congratulations!, and the door itself was covered in multicolored streamers.

Glancing over at Kellan, I nonchalantly said, “Abby is here, isn’t she?” Denny’s wife had a thing for celebrations, no matter if they were big or small.

With a laugh, Kellan nodded. “Yeah, Denny too.”

Great. So getting on my knees and begging for some financial scraps was going to be even more humiliating. I supposed that was appropriate though.

It took some effort, but we finally got Gibson and Onnika into the rehearsal room. Gibson was mad about leaving the balloons outside, until she noticed that there were dozens more inside. I set Onnika down, then watched in awe as Gibson handed her a squishy balloon from the floor. It had taken a while, but Gibson was finally letting her sister in.