Page 130 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

Sick. Like Dad.I’d have started having a panic attack, or gone out and gotten smashed or high so I didn’t have to think about the implications?—

Instead, I look at Lennon.

She pulls away from me, one hand braced against the side of my ruined truck. Her face is white and wet with sweat, but her eyes are on me with a focus that feels like a hand around mine.

She knows what he’s doing, and the feeling of being together in the shared reality where we both know I’m not the man Jake is describing means everything.

I take a deep breath.

Then another.

Dr. Delaney’s voice comes to me, absurdly calm in the middle of the ditch. Name the sensations you feel. Stay in your body. Name the true things.

Mud under my boots.

Blood on my hand.

Lennon alive.

Jake on the ground.

I’m not fifteen anymore, and I’m not my father.

I’m certainly not the story my brother tells when he needs to sound like the sane one.

“It’s over,” I say.

My voice is low, and it shakes, but it is mine. “I may never know what really happened to Dad. Maybe Mom poisoned him. Maybe she just convinced him he was too broken to live. Maybe you helped. Maybe you watched and called it loyalty. But I know what you did to Lennon.”

Jake’s nostrils flare.

“You don’t know shit,” he spits.

“I know enough.”

He turns his head toward the gas station like he has just remembered the world exists beyond the ditch. A clerk is walking toward us from the edge of the lot, phone held out, too far away to hear everything but close enough to be an audience. Which is all Jake has ever required. Jake’s face shifts almost lazily into a pained expression.

“Only someone sick in the head could suggest a thing like that,” he calls, voice suddenly louder. “Do you hear him threatening me?”

The clerk slows.

I see the exact second Jake decides which mask to wear.

My body reacts before my mind does. Not with another fist in his face, though I can’t say the idea doesn’t cross my mind. But no, this is older training and newer discipline meeting somewhere in the middle.

I step sideways, putting myself between Jake and Lennon without touching him again.

Because Lennon is behind me, and protection is not the same thing as punishment, no matter how much I want them to be the same for at least one more minute. Jake could stand to lose another couple teeth first.

“I have proof,” Lennon says as the clerk approaches in the distance.

Her voice is stronger than her body looks. She reaches for her phone with muddy hands and lifts it high. “I have the video of him poisoning the coffee tin. I have?—”

Jake looks at her with that same sympathetic smile he has worn my whole life, as if no one could possibly believe anyone else’s truth if he got to tellhismost-reasonable version first.

“Do you?” he asks, voice smug. The blood in his teeth makes his smile grotesque.

Lennon looks down at her phone and then her face just goes empty with shock.