Trent leaves. The door shuts behind him and I go back into the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed, sinking in, wondering what just happened.

I sit there for a long minute. I wonder if I should just go back to bed, or at least try, see him in the morning and talk it over then. But that feels wrong, feels like I’m abandoning him when he needs me.

Fuck it, I can try. If he wants to be alone he can tell me he wants to be alone and that’s fine, but I’m going to try. I stand, grab the robe, get his phone from the floor and take my room key and walk into the deep dark of the hallway.

I knock lightly on Trent’s door, hoping I don’t wake anyone else up. There’s no answer.

I know he’s in there, so I knock again, louder, and this time he pulls the door open, still shirtless, face dark.

I hold out his phone, the glass casing fractured with a thousand lines. It’s pretty broken. Trent just looks at it, then at me, and swallows hard.

“I would never hurt you,” he whispers.

“I know,” I say.

We look at each other for a long time, and finally, he takes the phone out of my hand.

“I don’t want to be someone you’re afraid of,” he says.

“You’re not.”

He’s just looking at the phone in his hand, shattered almost beyond recognition.

“Maybe you should be.”

I cross my arms. It’s late, I’m tired, and I want to get to the bottom of whatever’s actually going on.

“How about you let me decide what I’m afraid of and you focus on inviting me in and telling me what the fuck happened?”

A smile glimmers around his eyes, and he steps back, letting me in. His suite’s pristine, probably because he more or less hasn’t actually been living here for the past week. Trent tosses the phone onto the counter with a clatter, then walks in and flops on the couch, rubbing his face with both hands.

“I don’t know,” he says. “My shithead brother won’t tell me. He wants me to deposit five thousand dollars into his commissary account, and he somehow got hold of a phone at four in the morning to call me, but he won’t tell me how he did that or why he wants the money.”

I sit next to him. Even though he’s much taller than me, he tilts his head down until it’s touching mine.

“It’s bad, Darcy. I can’t come up with anything that doesn’t end somewhere bad. And...”

Trent trails off, taking a deep breath, and I shift on the couch, pull his head onto my lap.

“If I give him the money, whatever this is won’t end. It’ll get worse, because that’s how Eli operates. But I’ve got no idea why he wants it. I don’t know if he’s trying to start some sort of toilet wine enterprise or whether he’s gotten into debt with a mass murderer.”

I stroke his hair. He shifts slightly, and now he’s looking up at me, his deep brown eyes searching mine.

“Whichever happens, it’s not your fault,” I tell him. “I’m taping that to your bathroom mirror. ‘What my brother does is not my problem.’”

“I wish it felt like that,” he says. “But it feels like everything he does is another punch to the gut. Fuck, Darce, this all started because I wanted to protect him.”

I keep stroking his hair, even though we’re suddenly in new territory. I’m pretty sure I know what Trent’s talking about, but this is one of the few details of his life I don’t know. I just know something horrible happened, and it was all a decade ago.

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t, because that story can be for later.

We sit there like that for a long time, and I stroke his hair, his head in my lap.

I know I don’t understand. I don’t have any siblings, blood or otherwise. I’ve got no idea what it feels like to share your DNA with someone, to grow up with them, to be fiercely loyal like this to them even when they fuck up beyond belief.

I had foster siblings, but it’s not the same. When I was fourteen and my last foster father sneaked into the girls’ bedroom at night, I didn’t try to protect the girl whose bed he went to. I didn’t do shit.

I just laid there, thankful I wasn’t on the bottom bunk, and planned out how to run away.

“He still blames me because Dad died,” Trent says, his voice low and dreamy.

“He shouldn’t.”

“He does. I think he blames me for Mom, too.”

“Because you should have been your father’s only punching bag?”

“Eli doesn’t make that much sense,” Trent rumbles. “He doesn’t have fucking reasons for it. He just does.”

I still don’t know what to say, because I want to tell him that his father was a monster who’s better off dead and his brother’s an idiot who’s deserved everything he’s gotten. But I don’t think that’s going to help right now, and it’s definitely not what he wants to hear, so I don’t say anything.

After a while, he sits up, sighs, stands. Holds out his hand to me, still on the couch.

“Stay over,” he says.