The Unquiet - J. D. Robb [154]
“ At least you went back for him. I’d have left Jay in the dust if he hadn’t been able to run faster than me. He’s only fourteen months younger . . . and a boy, you know?”
“You like boys better now, though, right?” He grinned at her, playing hopeful.
“Some.” She let her eyes tell him which one in particular, but then remembered the circumstances and lowered them away. “You and your brother became friends eventually?”
He leaned back physically—pulled back emotionally, reluctant to go on, but he did. “I don’t know. I thought maybe . . . I hoped, but I don’t know.” He sighed heavily. “He was barely nine when our mother got sick. I was eighteen, ready for college. I wanted to stay home but my parents insisted that I go as planned, that they were going to lick the cancer. They didn’t want me standing around like a ghoul waiting for her to die because it just wasn’t going to happen. So I left. I drove home every other weekend to spend a few hours with her. She looked worse every time I saw her. It wasn’t long before I was forcing myself to go home, using every good excuse I could think of not to but . . . I was there when it happened.” He shook his head, laced his fingers together between his knees, and leaned on his forearms. “She warned me. She tried to tell me but . . . too much time went by before I realized . . . before I knew what she meant. I was too late.”
“For what?”
“Oliver.” He lowered his lids over the guilt and regret in his eyes, concealed his pain from her, kept it private and untouchable. “After . . . I stayed away as much as I could. I hated going home. It was like a museum—all these cold facts of the past, a lot of artifacts of what had once been a family but no sign of life. My dad was a hollow shell. He threw himself into the company. He started drinking. A lot. Oliver got kicked out of a new school every other month it seemed like. Dad finally put him in a military school.” He stood suddenly, stepped to the front of the big empty fireplace and kept his back to her. “They damn near broke him completely. A school for delinquents was the last place he needed to be.” His voice said he wanted to argue his point but there was no one there contradicting him.
“I stayed in school, nursed my sorrow in private, moved forward. Summers, and for four years after I graduated, while I worked on my thesis, I worked the mines. Most of them. Straight labor at first, then some of the heavy equipment. I drove a truck for a few months one winter in New Mexico. Just about the time I got good at something or started settling in, word would come down from on high that I was to go somewhere else, do something different. And that was okay.” He shrugged. “It was part of the plan. He couldn’t just turn the company over to some green kid fresh out of college. I needed to work my way up like my grandfather and my dad after him.” He chuckled absently and half-turned to her. “Lucky for me I wasn’t trying to marry the owner’s daughter. Dad used to say his love was sorely tested.”
“I bet.” They shared a smile but all too soon his faded.
“Point is: Oliver was alone. I was older and still connected to Dad through the company, but Oliver was ten, eleven, twelve, then fifteen and sixteen, and without my dad or me, there was no one to support him or share his pain or show