Chapter 27

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Once dessert was finished, I was dragged outside to the gardens. Jesse insisted he wanted to show me something or someone called Hoggy.

Patrick followed us the cottage and said, “I haven’t seen Hoggy in weeks, Jesse. Are you sure he’s still out here?”

“Hoggy is never gonna leave. He’s happy here.”

I learned, by a hole in the ground adjacent to the cobblestone sidewalk, that Hoggy just happened to be a two-year old groundhog who had taken residence in the Brogans’ front yard.

As the three of us inspected a deep hole that was about a foot in diameter, Jesse said, “He’s the size of a basketball and eats the garden. Momma says it’s his buff-it.”

“Buffet,” Patrick corrected his brother. “An all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“Yeah, that,” Jesse said while biting one of his fingernails and looking into the hole. He jumped up and down once with fresh excitement and clarified, “Hoggy sleeping. He will come out and play later.”