“I know,” he says, nodding. He keeps nodding, even when I’m exhaling hard to hold back a tear that threatens to fall. “Yeah, that’s hard. I know it’s hard. You put up with a lot when you were my age—and even earlier than that. I can’t tell you to forget all of that, but I can tell you to stop worrying about me. For once, you can put yourself first.”
I stare back at my brother, at this young man who has grown up in front of me. He’s no longer a floppy-haired kid with skinned knees and missing teeth, who used to ask for Hamburger Helper every Friday and didn’t realize that there was actually supposed to be ground beef in it until he was fourteen and learned that I couldn’t afford ground beef. He’s an adult now: auburn facial hair, a deeper voice, and a life away from me at college. Still, the survivor in me will always see him as the boy who cried himself to sleep every night, so I always had to wait for him to fall asleep first.
“Sometimes I don’t know how well I’ve taken care of either of us,” I admit after a beat.
“How so?”
Of course I can’t tell him where the rent money came from when I was a freshman in college, or where his tuition money is coming from now. I can’t tell him about the time I screwed a frat guy so I could spend the night at the frat house because I had an early morning interview at a café nearby and didn’t have enough change to take the bus from our apartment. I can’t tell him that I flirted with one of his classmate’s dads so I could get him invited to a sleepover on a night when I needed to work a graveyard shift at one of my jobs. I raise both shoulders. “I don’t know how to let my guard down,” I admit. “Even when I want to, I always have this lingering fear that we’re going to lose it all.”
“Yeah, and if that happens, I’m going to help you figure it out,” he replies, his voice swelling with confidence—classic Nolan confidence. “One of these days, you’re going to have to learn to fully trust someone other than yourself.”
“Is this you being wise? A year of college and suddenly you know how the world works?”
“No, but I do know that you’re allowed to pick yourself,” he presses. “You don’t always have to sacrifice for other people because those people you’ve sacrificed it all for—those people like me—love you more than you’re ever going to realize, Liv. They love you so much.”