He lowered his eyes when mine started to well up with tears. Looking down at his hand, he slid my phone onto one of the nearby outdoor tables. “You left this. You said your sister was singing here, and I thought you might need it.”
His voice was steady, neither harsh nor hopeful. He was just Chase, direct and to the point. After everything he’d overheard, and whether he believed any of it or not, only one thing mattered to him.
“Was it always about him?”
Brandon.
My heart slammed against my chest in denial, beating against my ribs as I stayed silent. I wanted to say no, but the truth was uglier than that. All those little and not-so-little ignored thoughts swelled in my gut, accusing me until my heart could no longer move under the onslaught.
“I’m sorry.”
Chase tucked both lips into his mouth and nodded more to himself than me.
And I couldn’t stop him when he left.
* * *
I sat in my car for hours after Lava Java closed and the parking lot emptied, feeling as crushed as the printed DNA results I’d finally remembered to retrieve. I smoothed open the paper on my lap, noticing deep crease lines in several places. How many times had Brandon folded and unfolded this paper? And yet he’d kept it. A tear hit the top corner, blurring a little of the ink as it spread. Would it even have mattered if I’d shown it to Selena? Or would she have accused me of printing a fake result like I had supposedly tried to produce a fake brother?
I hadn’t meant to tell her like this. It was just supposed to be Brandon seeing her and then taking time—however long—to decide what he wanted without pressure. Then, when it was just the two of us, after I had every word planned out, I’d tell my sister about our brother. But not like this. Another tear hit the paper I held. Not when she’d just sung in front of me for the first time and was half expecting me to tell her she wasn’t good enough.
She was. I hadn’t even gotten to tell her how beautiful she was on that stage, how every eye in the coffee shop was focused on her as she sang, and how I hadn’t wanted her to stop.
I put the paper away, following the deep folds Brandon had created, and my fingers stopped on a section that might have been a dried tear. I squeezed my eyes shut so that I wouldn’t add to it. I’d had one chance with Brandon to offer him something good, something to show him he didn’t have to cry alone, but that chance was gone, and I had nothing more to offer him. And the one ally I’d hoped to have now found my presence so abhorrent that she couldn’t even share a house with me, much less a room.
I hadn’t stopped at just losing my brother and my sister either. I’d lost Chase too.
I sat in my car, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of me, gasping for air that wouldn’t come and knowing I had no one to blame but myself.
CHAPTER 37
The next night was our last game before the finals, and I nearly missed it. I’d thought things would at least be easier around my parents, but I was wrong. I still felt sick over the inevitable fallout that would come when they learned about Brandon, because there would still be fallout. Discovering Dad didn’t know he had a son just meant there’d be a lot less anger to temper the pain.
That whole following day after Lava Java, I slunk around my house, hiding from my parents as best I could, claiming, for instance, that I needed to steal a few extra minutes for homework just so I wouldn’t have to ride with them to the game.
My team nearly paid the price for my cowardice when I continued to drag about my house after they left, only truly moving when a glance at the clock sent me crashing down the stairs and out the door.
At red lights, I pulled off my shirt and shorts and wriggled into my uniform, not even caring that anyone next to me might see. Once I got to the field, I flung my door open and sprinted toward the lights, my heart sinking as I skidded into the empty dugout. I was the last girl to arrive, but they all turned toward me from the field, where warm-ups were already under way.
Yeah, I’d made it, but it was close enough that no one was particularly thrilled with me.
I didn’t offer an excuse—not only because I didn’t have one, but because none would have been acceptable—as I joined them on the field, muttering an apology to each of my teammates and finally Dad.
“I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look at me, but I looked at him. For the first time in more than a month I looked at him without wanting to crawl outside my own skin. I looked at him, and I wanted to cry. Not because he’d hurt me—though he had—but because I knew that soon I’d have to devastate him.
“I nearly scratched you from the lineup card.”
I nodded and listened with growing shame to the passing remarks from several of my teammates.
“What the hell, Dana?”
“Where were you?”
“What’s more important than this?”
Used to be I would have saidNothing, and I would have meant it. Nothing was more important than getting my team to state. But that was before I’d found Brandon, before I had to spend weeks living with the sick dread that Dad had known, before I lost my brother, my sister and the guy I’d fallen for all in one night. It was before I had to look at myself and question the drive to win I’d always thought was for the game itself.
