“We’ll stay up all night if need be.” Dad took Mom’s hand in his, his cheekbones flexing.

“Any way we can go back to eating and talking about Dean’s future babies?” Keeley squirmed in her chair. “Rosie looks fifty shades of pale, and I’m kinda scared.”

“Are you okay?” I twisted my head, checking my girlfriend out. She didn’t look okay. She looked like she was going to faint. Rosie nodded, just barely. I took her hand in mine, and this time she let me, which wasn’t a good sign if you knew Rosie.

She was supposed to be pissed off with me.

“Inhaler, please.” Her voice was barely a hiss.

I rushed to her bag. I knew by then her inhalers were hooked into the front pockets and grabbed both of them before returning to the table.

Everyone’s silence grated on my nerves as Rosie sipped water after she used her blue inhaler. I shook with rage. What the fuck did my parents think they were doing? They had all the time in the world to tackle the Nina subject, and they decided this brunch was the perfect opportunity?

Fuck them.

Fuck that.

And fuck me, for forgetting to give her a heads-up. I forgot to tell her about us cornering Vicious, but even if I hadn’t, what good would it have done? Rosie was going to run to her sister and warn her off. It only would have made things messier.

“Well…this was fun,” Rosie muttered, her smile weak when we stood by the door. I helped her into her coat, feeling like the biggest douchebag on planet Earth. Which was ironic, because that was what she called me. Earth. What she hadn’t realized was that I really was our goddamn planet. Because when I was going to explode, a lot of fucking people were going to get hurt in the process.

My sisters and mom still waved at us when I opened the door and helped her into the Jeep. Her eyes were droopy, her body slack. I always brushed aside Rosie’s illness, but it was there, looming in the shadows, waiting for the perfect chance to grab at her throat.

I needed to come to terms with that but couldn’t. Every time I saw her using an inhaler—including today—I got so fucking mad, the need to punch a wall took over me. Nebulizers, pills, nasal sprays. My apartment was full of them now. I had Dr. Hasting on my speed dial, her physiotherapist’s address, and knew the exact times and days she went for appointments and what to do when she started pounding her chest and hissing like a snake. I knew that the average lifespan of a cystic fibrosis sufferer was thirty-seven. I knew all of the male diagnoses with CF were infertile, and many of the women had difficulties having children.

And I didn’t want to know any of these things.

Because she wasn’t a fucking illness.

She was a person I made plans with. And those plans exceeded the ten years she statistically had left.

I started the car but didn’t release the E-brake. Staring out to the neatest tree-lined street in the world, where my family resided, melancholy trickled into my heart.

What the fuck are you doing, asshole?

“You have a secret. Big one,” Rosie whispered, looking out her window.

Rosie and I didn’t get off on the best foot in our relationship. I wanted her to get used to us before she knew I was actually a we.

Her whole package may have been explosive, but mine was messy. Very.

“So do you,” I said. She offered me a startled glance. No denial there.

“Yeah,” she said. “We already suck at this relationship thingy.”

“Are you kidding?” I chuckled. “We’re fucking killing it. It’s a bump. A little dog ear in our book of awesome.”

“In my reality, every bump can have crucial consequences,” Rosie reminded me.

“And in our reality,” I countered, “I will always be here to make sure we smooth things over.”

We drove in circles for a while, just like we did our first night together in Todos Santos. I took her to all the places we visited before we had sex for the first time. To our old school, the marina, Liberty Park, and then, finally—to that bench. People were calling us, our phones buzzing and vibrating in our pockets. My father, mother, Rosie’s parents, Vicious and Millie. So when I parked on the hill overlooking the basketball court, I threw both phones into the glove compartment and shut it before we headed to our seat. Nervous didn’t quite capture the chaos that brewed within me. I was going to place my secret in her hand. A secret no one was supposed to know but my immediate family. And I was going to bare my weaknesses before her.

All of them.

Layer by layer.

Naked and exposed.

And hear for the first time if the real me—all of me—was still worth loving.

It didn’t feel right to sit. There was too much adrenaline in my bloodstream, too much sorrow in the air. The winter nipped at our skin, and Rosie was covered head-to-toe, as she should be.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said. She coughed a little.

“I’ll only slow you down. I can’t do long walks.”

“You never slow me down. You give me time to appreciate my surroundings.” My balls protested again. Stupid balls didn’t understand that making her happy would benefit every part of my body. Them included.

We strolled downhill, past lush green knolls, dodging low hanging branches and untrimmed vines that had begun to invade the cleared path. Her hands were tucked inside her coat and mine were in my pockets.

There was never a good time to break the kind of shit I was going to tell her, so I did the Band-Aid thing and went straight to the point.

“My biological mother left me to die in a Walmart bathroom when I was three hours old.” My tone was blasé. She continued slugging ahead, her muscles tensing at my confession. “She was a crackhead. The minute she found out she was knocked up, she took off, left her family in the countryside and disappeared somewhere in the gutters of Birmingham.”

Rosie was a smart girl. I knew she was bound to suspect something was going down.

Maybe she thought I was a deadbeat dad who fucked off once things got too real. Yeah, that wasn’t an option. I always wrapped up Dean Junior. I had personalized condoms, for fuck’s sake. The only person I didn’t use a condom with in my entire life was Rosie herself. I’d never felt another woman’s pussy, flesh-to-flesh, before her.

“I didn’t…” She tried to gulp all the oxygen she could get to stop herself from crying. “Please, continue.”

“I was found by the janitor. My mother, Nina, was found a couple blocks down the road, buying cigarettes. Her dress was covered in blood. When they took her to the hospital, she called her sister to help her deal with the legal trouble she had gotten herself into. Nina’s sister is my mom, Helen.”

“Jesus.” Rosie’s lips trembled, and so did the fingers she covered them with. A part of me, the logical part, I guess, acknowledged that it was fucked up that none of my friends knew I was adopted. But this, right here, was exactly why I wanted to keep it that way.

I was powerful.

I was imposing.

I was a motherfucking god.

These looks of pity and hushed whispers of sweet words did nothing to soothe the gash Nina created when she dumped my ass. Only reason I was willing to tolerate them now was because it was Rosie who was giving them to me. I would take any emotion from her. Even pity. Even hate. Anything, as long as it’s not indifference.

“My mom—my real mom, Helen, the one who raised me—decided to adopt me. I think Eli was game because…” I gave it some thought, a chuckle escaping my lips. “Well, because he is pussy-whipped, I suppose. He really loves my mom, you see. Nina didn’t want me anyway. She had a lot of shit going on in her life. I don’t even resent her for that. I mean, it’s pretty screwed up to leave your newborn in a public restroom, yeah. But that’s not why I hate her guts today. Not really. By the end of the first day of my life, we were all at the same Birmingham hospital. Nina signed my birth certificate and didn’t include my father’s name—she said she didn’t know, and honestly, it wasn’t that surprising to anyone in her inner circle—and my parents started filling out the paperwork for the adoption.”

“Oh, Dean. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry,” Rosie repeated herself. We were still walking, which was good. I didn’t want to have this conversation with the unnecessary discomfort of eye contact. Already, it felt like the truth was being ripped from my mouth like teeth, one by one. She took my hand, squeezed it in hers, and I drew in a breath, feeling the pressure in my lungs as they filled.

“My dad accepted a job offer in California, and they moved. Mom got pregnant with my sisters. And I looked so much like my family that no one bothered to ask. People just assumed I was Helen and Eli Cole’s son. We never bothered to correct them—because why the fuck, you know? It worked. We got away with it, and the lie became so big, so fucking huge, it was too late to backpedal and expose it to the world.

“It’s not like my family ever made me feel different. My sisters know. My parents always treated me the same as them, so it’s not like my adoption mattered to anyone.” I paused, scowling. “Well, anyone but me. My mom was under the false illusion I could bond with Nina. My dad believes that everyone deserves a chance—well, he would. He’s a lawyer. His job is to defend criminals. Either way, they always made me go and visit her in Alabama. Every summer until I was eighteen. That was the deal.”

I thought back to my last summer with Nina when I turned eighteen, and a chill broke down my spine. The gold-digging bitch. The mere thought of what she did had my fists itching for a bloody fight.

“At some point in her train wreck life, Nina got married to a dude named Donald Whittaker. People called him Owl because he used to deal drugs from two a.m. to six a.m. on street corners. Real catch, as you can imagine. Whittaker got locked up, was released, and decided to move to the outskirts. Bought a piece of land—a farm—and lived the farmer’s dream. Nina kicked her crack habit, so as far as my parents were concerned, she was clean. She looked clean, because she was no longer shoving needles with poison into her veins. She moved to more dignified mommy drugs. Adderall, Xanax, oxy. The fun stuff that makes your addiction fairly invisible. And I never bothered to correct them because I was a pathetic little bastard who hoped to shit that one day the woman who gave birth to him would realize that he is worthy and love him.”