“I’m definitely not putting five thousand dollars into your account if you won’t even tell me what the fuck for!” I say. I’m trying to keep my voice down, but it’s not fucking working.

“I’m not asking for a handout, just an advance,” Eli says in his flat, affectless voice, the one he’s had since he went to prison.

“You realize that funding your commissary account at all is a fucking handout, don’t you?”

No response.

“The fuck are you going to do with five thousand dollars? Buy ten thousand cigarettes?”

“It wouldn’t buy that many.”

“That’s not my point, Eli,” I say, shoving my hand through my hair. I’m pacing back and forth in the living room in Darcy’s suite, and I’m trying to stay calm despite the rage and panic spiking through me.

“I’m just saying.”

I take a deep breath and turn on my heel, stalking back toward her kitchen.

“You need to tell me why you’re calling me in the dead middle of the night from prison and asking me for five thousand dollars,” I say, trying to control my voice. “Fuck, Eli, you need to tell me how you’re calling me at four in the morning, because I’m goddamn sure this call isn’t state-approved—”

“The only thing I need is the money,” he says, and suddenly there’s a snarl in his dead, flat voice. “I don’t owe you shit, Trent, and I don’t have to tell you shit.”

“And I don’t have to give you shit.”

“Are you really gonna do this to me?” he asks, the snarl quiet and dim, but still there.

In a strange way, it feels good to finally piss my brother off, because for years whenever he calls, whenever I’ve visited, it’s felt like I’m talking to a brick wall.

“Yeah, I fucking am,” I say.

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line, so long I almost think he’s hung up.

“You’ve always been like this,” he says. “You get lucky and think you shit gold, and I get the short end of the stick and you won’t even—”

“Don’t even start, Eli.”

“I don’t know what else you call it. You get the nice fucking grandma judge and she gives you fucking parole, I get the hardass who tosses me into a prison upstate run by Mexican gangs.”

I take the phone away from my ear and stalk back across the living room, because I’m seeing fucking black. Eli was there the day everything happened. He fucking knows why it did, and he fucking knows it’s not the same.

“I didn’t beat someone to death on camera,” I say through clenched teeth, even though I know I shouldn’t argue back. I should hang up and go back to bed, because fighting with Eli’s never done a damn thing but piss me off.

“You still got off light,” he says, voice back to flat. “And now you can’t even help someone who didn’t.”

“I’m not having this conversation,” I tell him. I should have told him that the moment I answered the phone. “Unless you’re going to tell me what the money’s for or how the fuck you’re calling right now.”

Silence. There’s a shuffling noise in the background.

“Bye, Trent,” he finally says, and the line goes silent.

I keep pacing furiously. He’s always done this, fucking always, and of course my little brother can piss me off more than anyone else in the world.

But he makes me fucking livid, the way he can’t take responsibility, the way he constantly thinks the world is out to get him. The way he blames me for his shit.

The bedroom door opens, and Darcy’s standing there, stark naked.

“You okay?” she asks, her voice soft and worried.

“Eli somehow called at four in the morning and wants me to send him five thousand dollars,” I spit out, still pacing furiously. “He won’t tell me why, he won’t even tell me how the fuck he’s calling me right now.”

I turn, the phone still in my hand. I still feel like I could breathe black fire if I wanted to.

“And then he fucking blames me. That night, the night I got arrested, I was fucking protecting him and he fucking knows it and he fucking blames me for all his problems!”

I hurl the phone at the wall. I don’t even think about it, just channel my fury and frustration and pitch it as hard as I can.

It hits with a sharp crack, falls to the floor, and Darcy flinches.

Fuck.

Her eyes dart from the phone to me, and she looks afraid. Of me, of what she knows I could do.

I feel like a fucking monster.

I thought I had it under control better than that, I thought I knew better than to throw something when I could have easily hit Darcy, and I didn’t.

The look in her eyes stabs me deep, a needle to my heart, thin and piercing, leaving me breathless. I’ve got no fucking excuse, because I’ve flinched at thrown objects before. I know exactly what it’s like to wonder if you’re next, and I can’t fucking believe I made her think that, for a second.

“I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing my face. “Fuck, Darcy, I’m sorry.”

She glances at the phone again.

“Trent, just—”

“I need to go,” I say. “I’m sorry, Darce, I shouldn’t have...”

I move past her, grab my pants from the floor, pull them on.

“I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She starts saying something else, but I feel fucking run through with a blade, like I can’t even see or think or breathe. I just need to get out, away from Darcy because the thought that I could have hurt her, that I could lose control and do something, makes me sick to my stomach.

In my own suite, I sit at the kitchen table, my head in my hands. I try to force myself to think about something else, anything else, but it just replays over and over again:

The phone arcing through the air, the crash, her flinch, that look.