Chapter 6

I felt him collapse into me in that hallway before I felt anything else. His whole weight, all at once, dead air where his legs should have been. I caught him the way you catch something you've been waiting to catch your entire life, and underneath the grief on my face, real grief, in its own strange way, because Sarah had never done anything to deserve what I did to her, there was something else. Something I am not proud of. Relief, twenty-years-in-the-making relief, arriving in a hospital corridor that smelled like bleach and bad coffee, dressed up as comfort so well that even I almost believed it.

He asked me once, weeks later, why I'd sounded so calm that night. I told him someone had to be. What I didn't tell him was that I'd rehearsed calmly the way other men rehearse a wedding toast, alone in my car outside her sister's house three separate times that month, waiting for a night that finally, finally arrived.

I handled everything after that, because he couldn't. The funeral, the flowers, the calls he couldn't bring himself to make. I stood beside him at the service with one hand flat against his back the entire time, feeling him shake, feeling something in my chest settle every time he leaned back into that hand instead of away from it.

"You don't have to talk to anyone," I told him, when a coworker of Sarah's approached with her hand already out. "I'll handle it."

"Thank you," he said. It was the only full sentence he got through that day without his voice breaking, and I held onto it the way a starving man holds onto a scrap.

I'd had a private lunch with her, weeks before, while she was still alive and warm and completely unaware she was being measured for a coffin. I told Mike I wanted to get to know her before the wedding. She was smarter than I expected, which made everything harder, and worth doing anyway.

"You look at him sometimes like you're afraid he's going to disappear," she'd said, watching me over her wine glass with more perception than I liked. "I've never seen a brother look at another brother quite like that."

"I almost lost him for five years," I said. True, and taken exactly the way I wanted, an explanation instead of a warning.

"I promise I'm not trying to take him anywhere," she said. "I just want us all to get along."

"I hope we do," I told her, and meant every syllable of it as a lie dressed up as a wish, because by the time our plates were cleared I had already decided what I was going to do about the fact that we never would.

Her things were out of the house within a week of the funeral, boxed and shipped to her sister without asking Mike if he wanted to do it himself. I moved him into the room beside mine the same day, closer than he'd ever slept under my roof, and he didn't argue. He barely seemed to register the change at all, which told me everything I needed to know about how far gone he already was.

Six weeks after the accident, he broke down at the kitchen table the way he did most nights by then, shoulders shaking, no words left in him. I pulled him against my chest and held his head there, the way I had a hundred times before that exact moment, though never once with the specific hope sitting underneath it that this time would be the one that finally changed something between us.

"I'll always be with you," I said into his hair.

"Everyone leaves," he said, barely audible, his face still buried against my shirt.

"Everyone always leaves eventually."

"Not me," I said. "I never have. I never will."

He didn't answer. He just cried harder, both fists knotted in the front of my shirt, and I tilted his face up toward mine, meaning at first only to look at him, to check that he was still breathing steady, and then I kissed him.

For one full second, he didn't move.

He didn't push me away.

His mouth was salt and grief and something underneath both of those that I'd been waiting twenty years to taste, and for those few seconds the entire house went so quiet I could hear my own pulse in my ears, louder than anything else in the world.

Then he pulled back, wiping his face hard with the back of his hand, refusing to look at me.

"I should go to bed," he said.

"Okay," I said, and let him go. I had all the time in the world. I had made absolutely sure of that.

Neither of us spoke of it the next morning. He made coffee. I sat at the counter and asked about the weather like a man discussing anything but the thing sitting directly between us.

"You slept in my room last night," he said finally, not meeting my eyes over the rim of his mug.

"You needed someone there. You were shaking."

"That's not really what I meant."

"I know what you meant," I said. "I'm choosing to answer the version of the question that doesn't scare either of us yet."

He almost smiled at that, the first almost-smile I'd seen from him in weeks, and something in my chest eased at having earned even that small version of it.

"You're impossible," he said.

"I've been called worse," I said, and refilled his coffee, and let the moment close the way I needed it to.

I let the silence sit three more days before I touched him again, one hand on his back that lingered half a second longer than it needed to. He didn't pull away. He never did, after that first time. I have thought, since, about calling that patience. It wasn't patience. It was the opening move of a much longer game, and I'd already decided, standing in that kitchen with his coffee going cold between us, exactly how far I intended to take it.