“I TRIED, MAN.” CON eyed the man lying in the bed with worried eyes, watching as the nurse approached.

Shame barely flicked him a look, his eyes too focused, too locked on the ceiling. A muscle bunched in his cheek.

“I told you not to bother her,” Shame said, voice hoarse. He twitched as the nurse sat down next to him, flinched when she touched him. But as she started to prepare the medicine that would feed into the already-prepared line, he didn’t even move.

Con might have been impressed, if he wasn’t so worried. He didn’t know what was in the medication—pain medicine or what.  But for Shame to let somebody else touch him...

Shame’s eyes flicked to his and he scowled at his friend.

“It wasn’t bothering her,” he insisted. “I just thought...hell. You should have somebody other than me or Riley coming around.”

“Shawntelle was here the other day,” Shame said, voice curt. “And Bree came by last night. My sister comes by. I’m fine.”

But he wasn’t.

Con knew that.

It had been well over a month since Charli had moved, well over a month since she’d been back to Bardstown.

She’d turned over power of attorney for the house to him and Con, insisting she’d be too busy to come back and handle the sale, whenever it happened.

And it had happened just this past week.

She hadn’t even been there to pack up the house.

A moving company had handled it.

She’d cut Bardstown and Shame out of her life.

She still called Riley and Con, but she did everything she could to get them to come to her rather than coming back home to visit. For the most part, Riley had been giving in to her. Con hadn’t. Not up until a few days ago when he’d figured, if he was going to get his sister to give in, it would probably be easier if he actually talked to her.

But she hadn’t given in.

Hadn’t changed her mind.

Shit, she hadn’t even asked about Shame. They’d been sitting there for close to thirty minutes before he even mentioned his best friend and then she’d immediately shut Con down.

“So, this is how it’s going to be?” Con asked, watching as the nurse started the medicine on a slow drip.

He’d been through this before, so from here on out, there was nothing that came as a surprise.

Except Shame’s lackadaisical attitude toward Charli.

Shame rolled his head on the pillow to face Con, his eyes tired. “It’s okay, man. I didn’t expect anything to change. She moved out, hasn’t called, hasn’t said or done much of anything that’s made me think she wants to talk to me. So...it’s all right.”

Con almost exploded, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good.

* * * * *

“HOW CAN HE JUST LAY there and say it’s all right? We both know it’s not. He’s going through this alone and the one person he wants with him doesn’t even want to talk about him!” Con exploded, pacing the confines of his brother’s office like a caged tiger.

Riley eyed him narrowly.

“You do remember we got customers out there, right?”

Con turned a snarl on him.

Riley lifted his hands.

He’d been holding down the ship mostly on his own the past few weeks. He was okay with it because he knew what Shame meant to Con. Shame meant a lot to Riley as well, but Shame and Con were practically brothers. The only thing that separated them was the fact that they’d been born to two different women, and both of them resented that fact.

Well, maybe Con resented it more than Shame did, considering some of the shit that Con had to tell him about Shame and Charli.

It had come as a punch in the face, but Riley didn’t hold it against either Shame or Charli.

Although he wished to hell Shame had gotten his head out of his ass a little earlier in the game.

“You need to remember something, Con,” he said, feeling like a father more and more these days, and not just because he was adopting Bree’s son. “You were the one to tell me that Charli has been in love with Shame for years. Now try to figure out what she must have felt like, finding out the news about the cancer, learning that he wasn’t going to fight it. It had to have been a punch in the gut.”

“But he—” Con started to argue, then he stopped. “She left, man. She just left.”

“Can you blame her?” Riley said softly. “We’ve all lost enough, and he pretty much announced he was just going to sit back and die. Who’d want to watch that?”

Con gripped the edge of the table and stared off at nothing. He wanted to argue. He wanted to fight. It was in his nature

But he knew it wasn’t going to do any good.

These were choices that were outside of his control.