Garrett arrived much sooner than I’d imagined he would. I’d barely been sitting at Dustin’s grave for thirty minutes when I heard his footfalls on the early summer grass. The night wasn’t cold. The heat and humidity lingered and had kept me company along with the insects as I’d spoken to Dustin’s headstone in the quiet of my own mind. I had so many questions, so many things to say to him, but all I felt in his silent company was peace. Something that not even Garrett’s presence could moderate.

Laying my hand over the grass in front of Starlite, I sighed and bid Dustin an inaudible goodnight before pushing to my feet and facing the man that I finally accepted I’d been falling in love with. Garrett Hill, Dustin’s older brother.

“Thank you for coming.” My voice was nothing more than a whisper, but Garrett gripped the hair at his chin and nodded bleakly. He didn’t say anything in response, just dropped his hands to his sides, buried them in his jeans pockets and curled his shoulders inward, closing me out in the most effective way possible.

I tried to arrange my thoughts into some semblance of order as I watched him, my heart aching with his refusal to so much as look at me as we stood barely feet apart. I tried to remind myself of the mantra I’d had for myself since Dustin had died: it wasn’t my fault. Unfortunately, in the face of someone who knew him as well I had, I couldn’t convince myself of that truth, especially when I saw the pain emanating from Garrett’s face. All I had was honesty. The truth. My truth. I just hoped Garrett would listen to what I had to say before I left.

“I really loved him,” I started, rocking back on my heels. “I need you to know that Dustin was my whole world, Garrett.”

I let the words hang between us as I tried to find the best way to explain how our past had all gone down. How Dustin and I had managed to fall in love, and why I had let him leave for college alone. Before I could gather the breath to continue, however, I was shut down.

“Just... don’t,” he finally said in a pained voice. He removed his right hand from his pocket and waved it in front of him like it had some magical capacity to shut me up.

“But—”

“Look,” he cut me off and stepped closer before stopping himself. Shaking his head, he stared at the grass by his feet and frowned. “I don’t want to hear this.”

I had so much to say and explain, I looked at him dumbfounded and sputtered out an, “Excuse me?”

Garrett swallowed several times, both hands rising to run through his hair and grip the roots manically. He still hadn’t looked at me directly, but then he didn’t need to. I already knew how the pain would look in his chocolate brown eyes. The stab of betrayal would be too much to bear and adding insult to my already injured heart, I could already see the warm glow of the attraction between us faltering. Garrett hated me. He blamed me for his brother’s death, and I couldn’t defend myself against that because I knew that it was true. Dustin had died because he’d fallen in love with me. Even if that hadn’t been by my hand, I was still the cause.

“All these years,” Garrett choked out, surprising me. “I spent so much time and energy hating you, blaming you for what happened to my kid brother, and I didn’t know. I didn’t even think about it.”

“Think about what?” I asked, hating the quiver of raw emotion tainting my already quiet voice.

“Does that matter now?”

“No. I guess it doesn’t.” I watched him for a while longer and realized the confession I really needed him to hear if this was going to be it between us. “I didn’t know you were his brother. I mean, he never called you Garrett when we were together, only Rett, and I didn’t ever ask you your last name after we met. It just didn’t seem important at first, and it’s not that I didn’t want to know, I just…”

“Stop. Just stop already. I didn’t make the connection, either, Kay, and the sad thing is, I actually saw you that night. You know? Crumpled on the floor from where your father had hit you. Broken and small, your dark hair fanned out around you as you protected your stomach. You were curled around it, so small, and then Dustin… and all the blood, his lifeless eyes. I just couldn’t...”

A silence descended quickly between us, implications, accusations, and blame all going unsaid. I felt raw, slicing emotions rise from the depths of my stomach until they were resting in my throat where they strangled me with my own guilt. I already knew what Garrett was thinking. I knew what he was leaving unsaid. Dustin being gone was on me. I was the reason Garrett had lost his younger brother.

“Look. I know…”

“Your father shot him,” he spat out with pure hatred and loathing. His feet shuffled with discomfort and his back curled like the weight of the world had just dropped onto his shoulders.

I swallowed again, my mouth so dry I was finding it increasingly difficult to do so. “I…”

“But you are not your father, Mikayla Quinten,” he continued and gripped the back of his neck with both hands, bringing his elbows in as he finally allowed his eyes to meet mine. “You were as much a victim as Dustin was. I can see that now.”

I couldn’t help the sob that fell from my lips when our gazes met. There was so much pain in his eyes, but not the kind I’d expected. This was the pain of haunting guilt that had hung from him for years, the agony of acceptance, and utter resolve that I couldn’t understand.

“Garrett, what are you saying?”

“It’s not your fault. It never was. Can’t you see that? Even after all these years? Jesus, Kay, I did everything I could to poison Dustin against you that night—before that, too. Like when I found out about your relationship with him.” He swore again, and the heels of his hands moved to his eyes leaving me stranded once again. “It’s on me, ba—” He shook his head again, dismissing the endearment. “It’s my fault because I listened to everything she said.”

With a humorless laugh, Garrett shook his head and let it fall back on his shoulders, his hands still pushing too hard against the sockets of his eyes as the emotions made his face crumple. I’d never in my life felt the kind of pain I was feeling looking at this man who now looked as though his soul was being ripped from him. The agony was palpable and rubbed against my own until the silent tears fell freely from my eyes in rivulets. He didn’t need to tell me who she was. The inflection in that one word told me that he was talking about Libby and it was the same way he’d always said my ex like it left a bad taste in his mouth. She’d been stirring the pot. She wasn’t my concern right then, though. Garrett was.

“I’m so sorry.” My voice was barely a cracked whisper, but he heard me.

“Why?” he asked, his head falling forward and hands pushing up to his forehead. He focused on something just to the left of me so he didn’t have to meet my eyes again. His eyes looked so dark that I busied myself, swiping the tears from my cheeks.

“He would still be alive if he hadn’t met me.”

“No. You can’t think of it like that.”

I glanced up and frowned. The last glimmer of hope made me search his face for something… anything. “Don’t you?”

“No. Kay, this shit started long before you met Dusty.” He took another deep breath. “You need to know that I wasn’t a good brother to him. I was fucking Libby behind his back, I was drinking too much, and majoring in fucking up to live up to my dad’s new expectations of me since I’d failed so colossally with my football career. The night I started the fight with your dad, your dad won that land fair and square. He was an asshole about it, sure, but it was on me. All me. And no matter what way I look at how it all unfolded, I know I killed Dusty the moment I decided to screw Libby.”

Garrett fell silent for a moment, his mouth opening and closing as though trying to find the words to condemn himself completely.

“You know, he thought they’d lost their virginity together,” he said, laughing bitterly, “but she’d lost it with me a week before they were ever together. He thought she loved him because he loved her in his own way, too, but while she was telling him he was the one and only for her, she was confessing how in love she was with me every moment we were left alone. I got bored of her bullshit fast and pushed her to be with him again, but she got restless while he was in camp and screwed the baseball team, half of my friends, and me again while he was gone. When Dusty found out about her cheating, he ended up running away and into your arms—where he was happy.”

The emphasis on the last word was what broke his control. Garrett’s eyes clouded with the tears before they fell, the drops disappearing into his beard as he stood staring at me, more broken than I ever could have imagined. I knew at that moment that I undoubtedly I loved him. I was in love with him even more than I had known. Even knowing who he was now and who he’d been to me in the past, I wanted him more than I could put into words, and what did that make me?

“Garrett.”

“Please, let me finish,” he said, his eyes flashing to mine and away. “You need to hear all of this.”

“I will, I promise, but you need to know that Dustin didn’t run to me that night. He was running away and crashed into me completely by accident, and his reason for running wasn’t because of you. The night Dustin and I met, he was distraught, but not about Libby. He was upset about your mom.”

“Mom?”

“He’d found out she was sick and didn’t have long left and he wanted to spend what little time she did have with her. But your dad told him that he either stayed on the team and in a relationship with Libby, or he would cut Dustin out of the family completely and he wouldn’t be allowed to see your mom at all.”

“I knew that. At the time I was pissed off with everything and just needed some kind of validation from my dad. I backed the asshole up.” He shook his head again and looked down at the grave. “I’d had to do my time, and I’d let the old man down. I figured it would be easier for everyone if Dusty just did him proud. Maybe we’d all get some peace. I didn’t know it would hurt him as much as it did. I got Libby off his back for a while when I realized how much she was fucking with him. That’s when we started dating, but she still wanted the prize, to get out of this town on his arm because, despite his efforts, he was still living that dream. The night he came back from college for Thanksgiving, Libby told us both you were fucking some guy from Amarillo, and he’d knocked you up. Dusty didn’t believe her about the guy. He said he knew you better than that, but he knew you had to be pregnant and confided in me that the baby had to be his. He trusted you, and he loved you with everything he was, Kay. He was hurt you didn’t tell him, but I knew. Once he’d convinced me that the kid was his, I knew you’d sent him away because you loved him and wanted to do right by him. You didn’t want to tie him down to the life the rest of us would end up living, and I knew I had to turn him against you. Only, it backfired, and my words sent him to your house. I should have stayed away after that, but you have to know as well as I did then, the moment he saw you pregnant he would never have left you. I honestly thought I would get there in time but…”

The whole thing had come out in one long stream of consciousness but cut off abruptly. His eyes were dragged away from his brother’s grave and met mine. They were hollow. Empty. Devoid of the warmth I’d always known to reside there.

“If I’d stayed away your dad would never have known he was there that night. I killed him, Kay. I was the one who sent him to his death, and I almost got you killed, too.”

“No.” I closed the distance between us and pulled him into an embrace. He didn’t fight me. He went limp in my arms and lowered us both to our knees where I held him as he fell into a death-like silence of remorse, grief, and guilt. Everything that I, too, had carried for almost fifteen years. He finally moved and swept me up into his arms, holding me like I was a lifeline as I stroked his hair and hummed the first thing that came to mind. I was clinging to my sobs with a thread, but it broke the moment I felt his first warm tears land on my shoulder.

We cried together. There was no judgment, no self-consciousness, just bleeding of emotions for everything we’d lost and had been taken from us.

For a future that could have been something beautiful.

“I’m so sorry,” he finally breathed. “I hated you. I hated you because he loved you—because you made him happy, and because I couldn’t blame myself. You were the easiest target. But now I know.”

“Know what?” I sniveled.

“I know why he loved you the way he did.”

Squeezing my eyes together, I dropped my forehead on his shoulder. As much as I yearned to hear what would come next, I couldn’t let him say the words. It would make leaving that much harder, and I had to leave. I had to think about Holly more than I could think of myself.

“It has taken me years of blaming myself to see the truth,” I finally said in a subtle attempt to change the subject. I was feeling more enlightened than I had in years, and maybe that was due to the fact that I was finally seeing that I wasn’t the only one blaming themselves for what had happened that night. “The only person who is truly at fault for all of this agony is the person who pulled the trigger. Garrett, life happens the way it’s supposed to happen. We all change directions and make decisions that change the course of our futures, but that night, my father had a gun, and he chose to use it. I can blame myself for being with Dustin all I want. You can blame yourself for pushing him to me that night, but neither of us had that gun, and neither of us pulled that trigger.”

I could feel the truth of my statement now. They were almost the same words Suzanne Hill had said to me, but it was only now I could see the logic in the words. I couldn’t regret loving Dustin. They were the happiest weeks and months of my life, and that time together had given me Holly. Looking back on the time we’d had, those stolen moments in the grove of trees and on the roof of the gym, they were mine—ours—and I would keep them close forever with no regrets anymore. Would Dustin still be alive if I had turned him away that night he came to my window for the first time? Possibly. But distancing myself from the grief for even a moment, I found that I truly believed we were supposed to meet that night, and if his fatal end was some kind of preordained destiny, this could have always been our course. Maybe this way I got more time with him. I got to love him and feel the love I had longed for most of my life.

It wasn’t that easy, of course. There would always be some sense of responsibility in my heart, but that was human nature. I’d lived with those thoughts for so long, maybe the new realization would just make the guilt lessen enough to enjoy my memories of the time Dustin and I had spent together. That was something I could live with in time. Just like I would learn to live with the sadness of losing Garrett, too.

Running my hand through the hair at the nape of his neck, I breathed Garrett in and closed my eyes, pushing my forehead into the curve where his neck and muscular shoulder met. Our grief was shared, the ache of our losses bringing us closer together in a way that could end in disaster. If Libby had wanted to hurt us, she’d managed it. If she wanted to cause irrevocable damage, I believed she’d achieved that, too. But more than all of that, I think she’d wanted Garrett and me to hate one another. Or at least for Garrett to hate me, but I don’t think she’d succeeded in doing that. I hoped she hadn’t.

“You think it will get easier, but it never does,” Garrett said, his hand finding my hair, his deep voice hoarse. “Losing Dusty, then Mom… it was hard. It was even harder, knowing how angry Mom was with Dad and me for our shitty attitudes. She was the smart one, and she never once blamed you because Dustin confided in her in a way he never had with me. She left me a letter to read after she died. Told me not to be so bitter. Not to grip onto my anger with both hands until it twisted me up, and the best advice she ever gave me was to move out of my parents’ house. I did as soon as I could, and my life got better. I stopped drinking so much and paid attention to what I was doing and saying to people. I ended my tepid relationship with Libby for good and developed my small stud farm on what little land I had left. I finally lived. And even with all of that, I still miss them both, and would give it all up for just one more day with them.”

“Boy, do I know that feeling,” I admitted, my fingers still trailing in his hair. “Just one more conversation could change everything.”

“You’re not going to stay in Childress are you?” he asked with a bone-deep sadness. “Not for summer, or to move here?”

“I can’t stay.” I pulled back and looked up at him, one hand cupping his cheek, my thumb running against the skin under his eye with reverence.

“Why? Give me one valid reason.”

My only valid reason was that I didn’t want to introduce my daughter to her uncle who I had been dating for almost three months. It seemed like some wild, fucked up, incest thing when I thought about it with any real solemnity, but he didn’t know she was his niece, and until I was brave enough to sit down and have that conversation with her, I couldn’t share that information with him. This left me with bullshit reasons to feed him, and though they were in some capacity the truth, they weren’t the true reason.

“I can give you two. Libby and I can’t exist in the same town, and I need to be somewhere else to clear my head and think about this.”

“What is there to think about?”

I knew he could feel the chemistry between us with as much force and Earth-shattering clarity as I could. He’d very nearly said a set of words that would have broken me not fifteen minutes earlier, but he needed me to say it. He needed me to vocalize my feelings so he could justify fighting for me, and whatever this was between us. He wanted validation, and I couldn’t give it to him, even if I was in love with him.

“You may be working past blaming me, but I’m pretty sure there’s a slither of resentment in here,” I said, tapping his temple. “You can’t get past fifteen years of thinking in one night or one conversation. Time apart will give us both some clarity.”

“I don’t think I need clarity.”

“I do,” I said, leaning forward and brushing my lips against his, whether it had been my intention or not, that small action said what I couldn’t say aloud. The kiss was filled with my love for him, and the moment he sucked in a surprised and contented breath, I knew he’d felt it, too. The confirmation of my feelings just hadn’t changed my mind. I couldn’t make a decision without talking to Holly.

“Kay, I can’t let you go.”

“You have to. At least for now,” I whispered, bringing my other hand up to mirror the placement on his opposite cheek. I met his eyes and held them, falling into the pools of melting chocolate before blinking and dropping my gaze.

“You said it yourself, there’s a preordained path we all take.”

I pressed my lips against his and silenced him, holding them there as I drew in a long breath into my nose and held it with my eyes closed before forcing myself to my feet. Garrett gripped my hand in his, squeezing gently before brushing his lips against the back of it and letting me go.

I walked away without looking back because I knew one gaze over my shoulder and I would go back to him and never leave. I believed in true love, in soul mates, but somehow my soul was now split between two men from the same family. One was dead and gone, and the other now seemed untouchable.