I tried to convince myself that I could fake it. I could just pretend to feel something until I actually did. No one would know. But after stopping by their place for her first birthday and watching this kid who looked like me eat her cake, and still feeling nothing beyond a little amusement and boredom, I knew pretending wasn’t going to be an option.
There was something broken inside of me. Something I’d never realized I’d needed until that blank feeling was staring me right in the face, mocking my inability to connect.
“Harris?” a voice called from between two cubicles.
I stood up and slid my hand absently down the front of my uniform blouse, smoothing out the wrinkles as I walked forward.
“You’re wanting to change the beneficiary for your death benefits?” the guy asked, glancing down at the papers he was holding as I followed him into the bowels of the legal department.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
I couldn’t be her parent. I couldn’t be the dad that taught her how to ride a bike or a surfboard. I wouldn’t be there to scare her prom date, and I’d never bandage her knees after a hard fall at the playground.
But I could help from afar. I could make sure Morgan had the cash she needed to make sure the baby didn’t go without. I could help in that way. And if something happened to me, I could make sure that they were taken care of. It was the least I could do.
And if someday the time came when Morgan and baby Etta received death benefits from me, I knew with absolute certainty that my family would find them.
They wouldn’t be able to stay away.
Chapter 1
Trevor
Even months after his death, my little brother was still the first person I thought about when I woke up in the morning and my last thought before falling asleep at night. He was everywhere I looked, in every conversation I had even when his name wasn’t mentioned. It was ironic, really, that he took up so much headspace when in the last few years before his death I could go days without thinking about him at all.
Henry had always been like that. He showed up at the least opportune moments, like the night I’d finally asked Kristen Preston out my junior year of high school and he’d plopped down beside us in the movie theater like I’d invited him along. When I should have been thinking about him and talking to him, we’d both been too busy to catch up, and now that he was gone and I’d do anything to erase that fact from my mind, he was all I could think about.
I missed him like hell. I was also so angry with him that I wanted to punch something.
I wondered if other siblings, ones who’d been born into the same family by accident of birth, felt the same way toward each other as I did toward Henry. Did they get so angry that they wanted to shake sense into their little brothers, or was it easier to give up on someone they’d never had to fight for to begin with? When he’d come into our lives, Henry’s placement had been temporary. It was months before we’d known that he might stay forever. As a boy who had watched numerous other children move in and out of our house, knowing that Henry would stay had been difficult for me. I’d had to make a conscious choice to think of him as family. Once that shift had been made, though, I’d known that nothing would ever sever that bond. Even after all of the things I’d found out about Henry after his death, I still felt myself fighting for the memory I had of him, searching for the answers that would show that his decisions in life had made any type of sense.
“Mom?” I called out as I pushed the door open without knocking. “You home?”
“I’m back here,” she yelled back from somewhere in the bowels of the house I’d grown up in.
I followed the sound of her voice down the hallway and found her seated at the long table in her craft room, gluing little sheets of paper on to a scrapbook page.
“Hey, Trev,” she said, lifting her head to smile at me. “Everything okay?”
Guilt hit me hard and fast. A few months ago, a random visit wouldn’t have garnered that type of question, but my mom seemed to have aged by years in less than a few months. Losing Henry, a boy she’d raised as her own since he was only two, had been a blow she hadn’t recovered from, but the revelation that he’d abandoned his own child seemed to have completely broken her.
“Just wanted to see you,” I said, smiling back. I stepped into the room and looked over the scrapbook she was making. It was covered in photos of my cousin Kate and foster brother Shane’s kids. It had been a few years, but I still couldn’t believe that my foster brother and cousin had fallen in love. The page Mom was working on had snapshots of their four oldest running through a sprinkler. “Lookin’ good.”