Dropping onto the dusty floor, while Chase was busy checking paint cans to see which were dried out, I pulled the closest box to me and took out the first album. Lots of pictures of Chase stared back at me. Baby pictures, school pictures, vacations and birthdays. I caught myself lingering over one of him and Brandon clutching a squirming brown puppy mid-face-lick, both of them grinning in that manic I’m-so-happy-I-can’t-contain-it way only little kids can. Selena and I had photos like that with our dog, Slammer. An ache tugged at my heart knowing that while we’d done so many of the same things, had so many of the same experiences, we hadn’t done them together.
I finished one album and started another, and another. I kept turning pages, smothering a laugh when I found one of Chase unwrapping his rock polisher with way more joy than anyone should have opening a rock polisher. That urge to laugh faded as I opened more albums, watching my brother lose baby teeth and learn to ride a bike, seeing his sullen face the day he got braces and the perfectly straight smile the day they came off. I found shots from his and Chase’s brief foray into Little League, and then so many more once he discovered he was meant to be racing through water instead of tearing around a baseball diamond. I dragged a finger over my brother’s face and across the silver metal hanging from his neck as he stood poolside after a meet. The ache in my chest swelled even as I smiled. If he’d grown up with Selena and me, he’d be holding a bat in most of these photos rather than a pair of goggles—Dad would have made sure of that.
There was so much more in these pages than what I’d found online. I was seeing Brandon’s whole life, all captured and carefully pasted into books. And not just his, Chase’s too. Somehow that made the sting sharper, seeing them together, the two people I wasn’t allowed to have but couldn’t stop myself from wanting.
There was only one album left in the box I’d found, and unlike the others, which mostly had plain black covers, this one was powder blue and had a stork embossed on it just above Brandon’s name.
“Hey.”
It was like the blood in my veins electrified. It jolted through me and I dropped the album, my trembling hands involuntarily flying to cover it. But it was too late. Chase squatted down next to me.
“I wondered what had you so quiet.” He slid the album from my lap, and I had to refrain from grabbing it back. “I didn’t realize we still had this.” Then, before I could stop him, he opened it.
Every muscle in my body clenched. There he was, all eight pounds two ounces of my brother the day he was born. I hadn’t expected it to be the same photo Brandon posted online every Mother’s Day, and it wasn’t. It was the same hospital room, though, the same woman lying in bed with her newborn son cradled in her arms. This one showed the hand on the railing, but also the arm, the shoulder and the full smiling face of the man looking down at them. My shoulders jerked, then jerked again and again as I tried and failed to muffle the sob that racked my body.
Chase’s head turned to mine in an instant. “Dana?”
I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at anything but that photo, that face. I gasped in a breath and it tore out again, sounding as if every jagged piece of fear long lodged in my heart came with it.
I pushed off the concrete to my feet and rushed into the driveway just as the moon was rising in the purple-pink sky. Open air and open space. I filled my lungs, but the air all came back out too fast.
Chase hurried after me, heedless of the boxes his much larger form knocked down.
“It’s not him,” I said, looking up at Chase, my body still shaking, me still half crying but smiling now too.
Chase’s arms came around me, holding me tight. “Not who? What just happened?”
I just shook my head against his chest, looking back into the garage at the other photo albums piled inside. All of it, Brandon’s entire life…our dad wouldn’t have missed it. The conviction burned through me, sudden and sure, helping—with Chase—to steady my breathing. He wasn’t there. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have.
It wasn’t a secret I had to keep anymore, not when it had never been kept from me.
And that was it, the thing that let my heart beat blood through my body again instead of misery: Brandon wasn’t a secret, and he wasn’t a lie. He was a brother and a son, which meant…
I’d have to tell them. All of them.
My breath hitched again, and some of that pain I’d let go of trickled back in before I even looked at Chase.
It hurt, finding out about the affair, and I still felt it. It hurt more when I thought about Mom with Selena only a baby herself when Dad was with Brandon’s mom. It happened nearly two decades ago, but the wound for me was fresh, and it would be for Mom—Selena too—when she found out. We wouldn’t suddenly be wrapped up together in a family hug, anxious and excited to welcome Brandon into the fold.
I didn’t know what any of them would do, least of all Brandon. He didn’t know a thing about us; he didn’t even know he had another sister, one who played the guitar just like him.
I started, a different kind of panic jolting me from Chase’s arms. “Selena’s singing at Lava Java tonight. What time is it?” I didn’t wait for his answer—the fading sky told me all I needed to know. I raised my hands to my head and said a word. Then I said it again, looking at him. “It’s the first time she’s letting anyone in our family come see her, and I promised her I wouldn’t be late. I have to go.”
“Right now? Dana, what just happened?”
My stomach clenched as I headed in a half jog to my car. “I should have already left.” That was more true than I could let myself admit.
“Wait, or let me drive you.” He caught my hand as I reached to open my door. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t,” I said, and even whispering the words hurt. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
He let go of my hand, but his hung in the air between us, and that trickle of pain became a stream. As I drove off, I watched Chase in my rearview mirror until it hurt too much to keep looking at him, wishing my heart could shut out what I didn’t want to feel as easily as my eyes could close on what I didn’t want to see. I hadn’t wanted to leave him like that. I hadn’t wanted to leave him at all, but the second I thought about Selena performing tonight—in less than an hour, according to the clock in my car—I had to go, and I had to at least try to bring someone else to hear her too.
CHAPTER 32
Idrove to Jungle Juice without a clear plan in mind, hoping that once I saw Brandon, I’d know what to say.
Chase wasn’t there, of course, but I was gambling on Brandon’s schedule, even as I pulled the door open and walked inside. Screaming monkeys and the girl my brother had a crush on greeted me.
