I knock on Trent’s door softly, hoping he’s in there because if he’s not I’ve got no clue where to find him.

No answer. I knock again, a little louder.

Maybe he’s just asleep, not somewhere else, I tell myself. People sleep when bad things happen, right?

I knock one more time, then turn away. He’s not there, and my stomach tightens, wondering where he went in a strange city at two in the morning—

But then the door opens. Trent gives me a glance up and down, then nods, steps back, gestures me in.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says, his voice full of gravel.

I almost ask are you okay or how are you doing or what’s up but those are all idiotic and trite and I bite my tongue rather than ask something stupid. He’s not okay, he’s doing bad, his brother’s dead, and I fucking know all that.

“Any more news?” I finally ask, once the silence gets too heavy.

He slumps onto a couch, across from the room’s queen bed.

“The prison morgue called,” he says, and he sounds like I’m talking to him from miles away. “They want to know where to send the... where to send him, what my plans are for him, who else they need to notify. All that.”

I sit gingerly on the bed opposite him. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never even had a grandparent or a distant uncle die, because that would require having either grandparents or uncles.

“Can I help?” I ask. “Do you want me to...”

I have no clue what needs to be done.

“...Call funeral homes or something?” I hazard.

“It’s eleven on the west coast,” he says, still looking at the curtains over the window like he can see through them. “I don’t think you’re gonna get an answer.”

“Well, tomorrow,” I say. “Are they going to bury him at the prison, or can they send him to Low Valley, or...”

“They?”

“Whoever’s in charge of it.”

Trent gives me a weird look, a little hesitant, a little put off. I think I said something wrong but I can’t pinpoint it.

“That’s me. I’m in charge of it. Eli goes where I say.”

I look down at my hands. I’d somehow assumed this would all be done by someone else, somewhere else, and it wouldn’t all fall on Trent but I have no idea why I thought that because I don’t know how either death or family work.

The one person I know who died was Allen, the roadie who was with Gavin and Liam, and I have no idea what happened to his body. I guess someone took care of it.

“Right,” I say, like I knew that and had forgotten.

“There’s nothing to do right now,” he says, his voice hollow again. He’s looking back at the window. “Go get some sleep, Darce. I’ll see you in the morning. Thanks for stopping by.”

It’s a dismissal, clear as day. I can’t help but be disappointed, because we’ve spent every night since that first one together.

But I know why, and I know shit happens, and I know it’s not about me. So I stand up. I give him a quick kiss, and I tell him he can wake me up if he needs me, I don’t care, and then I leave.

Back in my own room, in my oddly empty bed, I lie awake for a long time before I finally fall into a restless sleep, ready to wake up the moment my phone rings.

* * *

It doesn’t ring all night. Sometime around sunrise I fall asleep properly and only wake up when it’s almost noon.

Trent hasn’t called or texted, though Gavin and Joan both have, asking if I have any updates. I guess they haven’t heard from Trent either. I throw on some clothes, grab two coffees and a couple pastries from the hotel lobby breakfast, come back upstairs and knock on his door with my elbow.

He’s on the phone when he answers the door, listening to someone on the other end. He doesn’t smile, just nods and turns, so I follow him in.

I don’t think he’s slept. There are circles under his eyes, he’s wearing a white undershirt, and his room has that closed-in scent of insomnia and stress, random things scattered on the floor.

But at least no furniture is upside down. At least his phone’s not smashed. Everything could always be worse.

“You’re not listening,” he says. “I don’t want him there. He’s not going into Green Willows and I don’t fucking care how many spots my mother pre-paid for there.”

He pauses, listening. I put the coffees on the table and sit, sipping one myself.

“How far is Brookside Meadow from the Sunset Acres home? You know what, forget it, it doesn’t matter. Brookside is fine.”

Silence.

“First thing tomorrow,” he says. “North Delano said they’d call you and arrange for... delivery.”

Another long silence. I sip coffee and look at the curtains, wondering if I should open them or turn on the air conditioning, anything to make this room a little better.

“Thanks,” Trent says.

He hangs up his phone, tosses it onto the bed, and sits on it himself. It’s still made but slightly rumpled, like he’s laid on it but hasn’t gotten in. I hand him his coffee and he takes it without drinking.

“Fucking Eli,” he says. “I can’t believe he’s dead and still a useless pain in my ass.”

Trent looks at the curtain-covered window, and I look at my coffee, not sure how to answer that.

“The prison won’t release his body to a funeral home without someone to authorize it in person, otherwise they slap him in a pine box and bury him in some potter’s field they’ve got outside Fresno. And I can’t find a funeral home that’ll tell me shit about what to do until they’ve got confirmation that a body’s coming in, and the second I mention that he’s coming from a prison they all clam the fuck up and can’t wait to get off the phone with me.”

He takes a long, angry pull from his coffee, still glaring at the window.

“Not to mention I’ve got to buy him a burial plot, and it’s confusing the shit out of the cemetery because when my dad died, my mom bought four plots at once, like she thought we could all be together again or some shit. And like fucking hell am I burying him next to our father.”

There’s a pretty obvious solution, I think.

“It’s all a fucking mess,” he says, his jaw tightening. “I thought at least Eli’s fuck ups were contained if he was in prison, but apparently fucking not. Apparently he’s managed to put snarls in my life even when he got himself killed.”

Another angry drink.

“Have I mentioned that part yet? Stabbed twenty-something times with a fucking sharpened toothbrush. You’ve gotta be a pretty bad asshole to get that kind of attention in prison, but that’s what Eli was, a fucking useless idiot.”

He stands up, stalks to the window, throws the curtain open.

“We’re probably all fucking better off,” he says, his voice sharp and bitter. “Guess he’s done fucking up now.”

I take a deep breath and get ready to state the obvious.

“So let the prison bury him outside Fresno,” I say.

Trent turns, slowly, and looks at me like I’m an alien.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t have to deal with all this,” I point out, heart pounding, but I keep my voice calm. “You wouldn’t have to call funeral homes and schedule a transfer, you wouldn’t have to fly to California and give the go-ahead. You wouldn’t have to go at all, just let them bury him where they want and be done with it. You don’t even have to reschedule any tour dates.”

Trent keeps staring at me, his gaze so intense my skin starts crawling.

“Eli’s my brother.”

“I know.”

“I can’t fucking put him in some prison graveyard.”

I glance at my coffee again, even as Trent’s eyes bore into me. I fucking hate seeing him like this, and I hate that his terrible brother — his brother who killed someone — is the one making him such a wreck.

“He was in prison,” I point out.

“I’m not doing that to my little brother.”

“He’s dead, he won’t even know.”

“That’s not the point,” Trent says, and now he looks disgusted. “I’m not just— I can’t—”

He paces away from the window, takes a couple steps to the bed, turns back.

“I can’t fucking call the prison and say ‘do whatever you want with his body.’ He was my brother, I fucking owe him better than that.”

“Why?” I ask softly.

I nearly say you remember that he killed someone, right? But I keep my mouth shut.

“Because Eli’s my little brother!” Trent nearly shouts.

“Yeah, and he made you feel awful for years and he blamed you because he was in prison and you know that if he could have somehow gotten you to take the fall, he would have,” I say. “Why the fuck does he deserve this from you? He doesn’t, he’s never done anything but take from you so let them bury him in a pine box. He’d do it to you.”

I know that there’s something at work here that I can’t quite grasp, some emotional gut-punch that I’m seeing but don’t know how to feel.

But I’ve watched Trent worry over his brother for years, and I’ve watched him beat himself up whenever Eli calls, give his little brother whatever he can. Pay for lawyers, for cigarettes, drive up from Los Angeles once a month to visit him in in prison.

And I hate it. I hate that Eli’s been nothing but a drain on Trent the whole time I’ve known him, and now that he’s dead, he’s still a drain and Trent won’t just let him go.

“It doesn’t matter,” Trent says, his voice strange and baffled.

And he just looks at me, a look I’ve never seen on his face before. Like he’s never really seen me before.

“You can’t understand,” he finally says.

“I understand that Eli’s made you miserable for as long as I’ve known you,” I say, trying to keep my voice gentle, even though I’m pissed. Mostly at Eli.

“That’s how you can sit here and tell me to let my brother rot in the middle of nowhere surrounded by people no one loved enough to bury right,” he says. “You haven’t got a family. You haven’t got anyone you’d do this for.”

I open my mouth, silently. Then I close it, because I haven’t got a response.

“That’s how you can be fucking heartless,” he says. “You haven’t got a clue how it feels to have a sibling, to grow up with someone and then lose them.”

He says it quietly but his voice is shaking with rage.

“You’ve got a black fucking hole where your heart goes,” he says, low and flat. “Just leave.”

I don’t know what the hell happened. I didn’t think my suggestion was that bad, but here’s Trent in front of me, furious and glowering and looking at me like I’m the scum of the earth, and I feel like I can barely breathe.

Mechanically, I stand. I turn and I walk out of the hotel room, and I don’t think I even say goodbye, just let the door close after me, and my feet carry me to the elevator, to the lobby, outside into the Boston summer sunshine.

I stand there, and I stare, and I wonder how the fuck I’m supposed to fix this.