Okay. Something was seriously wrong. Dad wasn’t the conversational type. Not unless he was trying to sugar someone up for a con.

Bonnie gave up pretending and aimed her attention on Kevin. “You wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Kevin shot their dad a nasty look then bit out, “Like he said. Nothing.”

Nothing her ample white ass. She was just about to say as much out loud when Kevin muttered something she couldn’t quite make out under his breath and stalked to his coat thrown across the well-worn club chair. He reached underneath it and pulled out a slim, shiny laptop. “Here. I brought your computer back.”

“Hallelujah and praise the Lord!” She was on her feet and cradling the hand-me-down MacBook Pro Cassie had given her several months ago in less than a heartbeat. “I was starting to think you’d pawned it.”

Kevin scoffed at that, moved his jacket out of the way and dropped into the seat. “You gonna pile on and give me shit, too?”

“I don’t know,” Bonnie fired back, easy-as-pie. “Depends on what Dad was giving you shit for.”

“Nothin’ you’re gonna get involved in,” her dad answered before Kevin could. “If the two of you were smart, you’d steer clear of all that techno mumbo jumbo. It’s all gonna backfire on the lot of us one of these days and then what are you gonna do?”

Bonnie ducked her head to hide her smile and smoothed her hand over the top of the computer. Prepping for Armageddon or just a good old-fashioned technological revolution had been her dad’s favorite pulpit topic since Kevin had first shown him the internet. That said, he’d never put one iota of effort behind his prepper ideas.

Rather than give her dad any more to chew on, she focused on Kevin. “I still don’t get why you needed a Mac. What was wrong with that new Windows machine you got last year?”

Her dad grunted and wiggled in his recliner.

Kevin cleared his throat. “I just thought I’d try my hand at doin’ some app front ends. Lots of demand for people who can do that kind of work—especially, stuff that goes on an iPhone. Can’t do that with a Windows machine.”

“Yeah? How’d it go?”

Kevin rubbed the back of his hand across his nose and aimed his answer at the coffee table. “Not my kinda gig, apparently. Gonna have to stick to networks and databases, I guess.”

“Or you could stay the hell out of all that nonsense and get yourself a real job like your sister,” their dad said.

Kevin clearly wasn’t done with the arguing. “Just because I don’t clock in and out of some dead-end, boring-ass corporate gig doesn’t make it nonsense.”

“Oh, right,” Dad said. “It’s not nonsense. It’s the thing that’s always landing you in deep shit with more people than we can count.”

Mmm. Fair point. What Kevin called networks and database work, most other people referred to as hacking.