Aiden’s farmhouse is mostly dark when I pull up, with only a single bedroom window upstairs glowing faintly against the night. Everywhere else there are stars. Stars and stars and stars, and as I park my car and climb out into the warm summer air, I think I can almost understand why he likes it here. It’s like another world, and right now, another world is exactly what I need.

My hands are shaking as I try to hit the lock button on my key fob, and I make myself stop, take a moment to drag in a long breath of air. It smells like grass and wind and Kansas.

No city.

No roses.

No Zenny.

I finally succeed in locking my car and make it onto the porch, letting myself inside with the key Aiden keeps under a planter filled with dead plants. It might be ridiculous that I’ve driven almost an hour outside the city just to use my brother’s shower and steal some of his clothes, but Zenny asked me not to be at the apartment, and Sean Bell that I am, I still don’t feel comfortable sitting in my mother’s ICU room smelling of sex and used vegetable oil.

So shower and fresh clothes it is.

It is literally the only thought I’ve let myself have since Zenny left me naked in the shelter kitchen. The only decision I’ve allowed myself to make. I’m buried in the rubble of my own making, the destructive wall of my anger and love and need, and I can’t breathe. I can’t live.

Just get to the shower. Shower and then go to the hospital. Don’t think about her don’t think about her don’t think about her…

“Aiden?” I call out, tossing the key onto his coffee table. The man makes a lot of money but he’s too scattered to do things with it, like furnish his house properly. His coffee table is made from nailed together wood crates, and his couch is a stained lump from his college apartment. His walls are still the basic farmhouse white they were when he bought it.

“Aiden?” I call again, getting ready to go up the stairs. I saw his car in the driveway, but with Aiden those usual signs of human behavior are completely useless. He might have decided to Uber to Canada or go cow-tipping a mile down the road, there’s simply no way to tell. And just when I think for sure that he’s not here, a light flicks on and he comes skidding out of his doorway, still yanking up some pajama pants. A penis definitely flaps around in the process.

“Aw, Jesus,” I say, throwing my hand up over my eyes. “Why, man? Why?”

“What do you mean why, you—you cat burglar!” he splutters, stomping down the stairs to me. “Haven’t you heard of fucking knocking? I don’t know, calling maybe?”

I drop my hand, assuming it’s safe, and then Aiden pauses on the stairs, looking at me.

“Have you been crying?” Panic floods his face. “Is Mom okay?”

“She’s fine. I called Dad on my way here. They’re settling her into her room now.”

He visibly relaxes. Then grows suspicious. “So why are you here again?”

“I—I need your shower. And some clothes.”

He stares down at me, eyes narrowed. “But you have a shower at your house…” he says slowly, as if I’m trying to trick him somehow. “And clothes.”

“Zenny’s at my place right now. Getting her things. She doesn’t want me there. And I can’t go back to Mom and Dad like this.”

“Like what?”

I gesture impatiently at my rumpled clothes. “All post-fuck.”

“So wait, you fucked and then you broke up?”

“Goddammit, Aiden, can you just like—I don’t know, shut up for half a second and let me use your shower?”

“Ah,” Aiden says sagely, leaning against the staircase wall. “You’re hurting.” And then in the voice of someone in the throes of a dawning realization. “You’re in love with Zenny Iverson.”

The sudden, sharp urge to kill Aiden and bury him in his bucolic paradise outside nearly overwhelms me; I’m still fighting it off when a third voice comes from Aiden’s bedroom.

“Who’s in love with who now?”

“He’s in love with Zenny—oh shit—” Aiden’s face goes pale as Elijah comes out of Aiden’s bedroom, shirtless and very obviously in the throes of his own dawning realization once he sees me standing at the foot of the stairs. I am also being dawned upon. Because Elijah and Aiden may have been peripheral friends for a long time, but peripheral friends don’t wander out of each other’s bedrooms shirtless at night.

“What’s happening with Zenny?” Elijah asks.

Aiden looks nothing short of panicked, and I’m panicked too—but I’m also heartbroken and exhausted and too torn up to lie.

“Zenny and I have been…seeing each other,” I say. “And I love her,” I add, knowing this absolutely makes nothing better in Elijah’s eyes.

“You’ve been dating my sister?”

I’m too raw for this. “You’ve been fucking my brother?” I demand back.

Aiden flinches. “Guys, please.”

“No, no guys please,” Elijah says, livid. “I asked you to do one thing, Sean, one fucking thing, and that was to protect her. Not to fuck her! Obviously!”

“Well, apparently you’ve been fucking my little brother, so I guess we’re even now.”

Elijah clamps his jaw closed and I know he’s fighting off the urge to fling himself down the stairs and pluck out my eyeballs. “That’s different,” he says, with audible strain. “You know it is.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. Defeated. “She ended it.”

“I still don’t forgive you,” Elijah says. “Not even a little.”

What does it matter? Really? Zenny won’t love me, my best friend hates me, and my mother is about to be beyond the reach of love or hate. Why am I bothering to argue about any of it? I deserve the scorn, don’t I? Deserve the anger? And as good as it would feel to fight right now, to sweat and to bleed and to vent my anger at something instead of holding all this pain inside, I love Elijah too much to make him the target of it.

Elijah makes a noise of disdain at my silence and turns on his heel, back into Aiden’s bedroom.

Now it’s my turn to slump against the wall. I look up at my brother, young and bear-like in his broad body and shaggy hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask quietly. “I would have understood.”

Aiden sighs and comes down the stairs, sitting a few stairs up so he’s more or less eye-level with me. He braces his elbows on his thighs and puts his head in his hands, scrubbing at his hair. “It’s…I don’t know. Lots of reasons.”

I put my head against the wall. A failure as a lover and as a son and now—fourteen years after Lizzy—as a brother once again. “Fuck, Aiden. I feel like shit that I didn’t—that I wasn’t someone you could talk to about this.”

He sighs into his palms. “It’s not that, it’s—” He starts over. “Remember the kiss I told you about in college?” he asks. “My freshman year?”

I do remember it. Aiden had come to my apartment one night, drunk and rattled, and when I finally got him settled down with a grilled cheese because of course he hadn’t bothered to feed himself that day, this story came spilling out about the weekend before. The final trial of pledge week had been some nebulous ritual involving togas and darkness and kissing—all very Greek-sounding to me—but when Aiden kissed the brother on his left, it had been something more than chastely fraternal.

“I knew the guy,” Aiden had confessed, looking down at the empty plate where his grilled cheese had been before he inhaled it. “And it was dark, and you had to keep kissing for as long as they told you to, and they made us kiss for a long time and I—”

“You liked it?” I supplied.

I’m not going to pretend that Irish Catholic boys are the experts on kissing other boys, but I’m also not going to pretend that Irish Catholic boys are totally ignorant, if you catch my drift, and there’d been enough fooling around at my all-boys high school and enough frank gossip with Elijah that I wasn’t at all bothered by what seemed to be bothering Aiden very much.

On the other hand, I’d come out of high school knowing that I was a one on the Kinsey Scale—all my random encounters confirming my belief that I was mostly straight—and Aiden seemed to be coming out of this with a very different conclusion.

“I liked it,” Aiden had whispered. “What does that mean?”

“It means that you liked it.”

“But—”

“Aiden. Seriously. You know me and Mom and Dad. No one is going to give you a hard time about who you like to kiss.” But he had an expression like he might give himself a hard time.

Which is how, I imagine, we’ve ended up here on his stairs with my best friend half-naked in his room.

“After I talked to you that night, I kind of came to grips with—” he makes a vague flutter with his hands. “Being bisexual. But it seemed abstract still. Like it was okay if it was the kind of porn I watched, if maybe I flirted a bit, but actually dating a boy just didn’t occur to me. It sounds stupid, I know, but that’s how it was. The opportunity to be with another guy didn’t come up again and I never thought to chase it. And it was so easy to date girls. So very easy.”

I’ve seen Aiden’s very easy life with girls, and he wasn’t lying. He’s got the big Bell grin and the deep Bell dimple and the kind of body that promises being swept up and carried off to some evil sex lair.

“And then, I don’t even know. My firm was having an event that Elijah was planning, and all of a sudden, it didn’t seem so abstract anymore. One thing led to another, and then all of a sudden, I was really doing it.” He goes red in the face. “Uh, I mean being actually bisexual. Not…you know.”

“But that too,” I say, and I’m surprised at how warm and teasing it comes out, that I can still manage to be the big brother, the caretaker, even now when my heart is gone and pulped under Zenny’s doodled-on sneakers.

“Yes, that too,” he says, laughing and still blushing.

“You could have told me,” I point out.

“It’s so easy for you to say that. And easy for you to feel, I don’t know, like wounded that I didn’t tell you, feel like I didn’t trust you. But can you accept—just in part—that it’s not all about you? That sharing something like this is complicated?”

“Yes,” I say. “I can. And I’m sorry.”

Aiden looks up, propping his chin on his fists. “You’re my big brother, man, you’re Sean Bell. I wanted to party like Sean Bell, work like Sean Bell, be like Sean Bell. Telling you this would make me…not Sean Bell.”

“It makes you Aiden Bell,” I say, giving him a light punch to the thigh. “Which is even better.”

* * *

Elijah is still furious with me. I manage to shower and borrow some clothes, and then Aiden promises to be at the hospital in the morning. Elijah won’t even look at me the entire time I’m there.

Fitting. I barely want to look at myself.

When I get to the ICU back in Kansas City, I’m ushered to Mom’s room, which is walled with glass and has a large door opening to the nurse’s station in the middle of a semicircle of rooms. Dad snores on the small sofa across the room, and Mom’s awake, her eyes moving from the TV mounted in the corner to my face. I think she tries to smile, but the huge plastic mask over her face obscures it.

“Oh, Mom,” I say, coming over to her bed.

She lifts a hand, and I give it a squeeze once I reach her. Her skin looks better—pinker, less wan—and I have a moment of real, untempered relief. The BiPAP is working, the oxygen is helping. Everything is going to be okay.

I scoot a chair over so I can sit beside her and hold her hand, and to the harsh drone of the breathing machine and the various other beeps and blips of the monitors around us, we watch people shop for tiny houses and then act surprised when the tiny houses are indeed tiny.

And with both my hands curled around hers, I drop into a murky, exhausted sleep.

* * *

Morning brings shift change, so Dad and I are nudged out of the room. I don’t like it, but I’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to have the nurses on your side—and perfect hair or not, nurses don’t like family members clogging up their process. So we trundle out to the waiting room for bad coffee, and I go brush my teeth in the bathroom with the toiletry kit I keep in my car nowadays.

I call the office, leave a message with Trent the Secretary that I won’t be in, and then watch with disinterest as my phone lights up five minutes later with Valdman’s office line. It’s only because it’s shift change and I’m not needed with Mom I pick it up.

“Sean Bell,” I say in greeting.

“Son,” Valdman rumbles. “I need you in the office today.”

“Did you get the message I left with Trent?” I ask idly, knowing that he has. I decide to make more bad coffee and walk over to the machine.

“I did, and I’m calling you to tell you that’s not going to work for me.”

“The Keegan deal is almost fixed,” I say, stabbing at the brew button on the machine. “The nuns are moving in two weeks, well before the Keegan demolition schedule. We have a press release in the works, and the Reverend Mother has agreed to talk to the local media about it.”

“This isn’t about the Keegan deal. This is about your commitment to this company.”

I stare at the amber liquid spattering into the disposable cup. “I don’t understand. I’ve been keeping up on everything else remotely.”

I hear Valdman’s chair shifting. “Well, I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I’ll say it bluntly. When you told me last winter that your mom had cancer, I was willing to let you do your thing because I figured she’d die soon after. But it’s been more than half a year of your attention being divided, and that’s not the kind of drive I’m looking for in my firm.” His voice goes conspiratorially low. “I know you can do better. I’m going to retire from day-to-day soon, and when I do, I want you in the chair, my boy. But I can’t put you there unless I know you’ll put the company first.”

The machine finishes up with an obnoxious hiss and then clicks off.

“Are you…” the words are so insane in my mouth that I have a hard time forming them. “Are you asking me to choose between my mother and my job?”

“It sounds so stark when you say it like that. Think of it as adjusted allocation. You’re going to adjust how you allocate your time back to a professional level. And once you show me you can do that, then I’m willing to show you the keys to the kingdom.” His voice is fatherly, warm almost, as if he feels like he’s being magnanimously paternal right now. Meanwhile, my actual father is leaning against a window and staring at a highway, his broad shoulders folded into themselves like wings.

“No,” I say, and it comes out so easily, too easily maybe, given that this is the one thing I used to want above all others.

Valdman’s office, Valdman’s chair. To be king of the garbage people, the biggest eel in the tank.

But I don’t want it anymore, and I’m shocked to realize that it’s not even because of my mom, not even because of Valdman’s cruel ultimatum. It’s because of Zenny and the man I’ve become from knowing her.

“No?” Valdman sounds amused, like he thinks I’m joking. “Sean, be reasonable now—”

“I am being reasonable. My mother is dying. I’m staying with her. Thank you for the phone call.”

And then I hang up. I want it to feel good, but it doesn’t feel like anything.

Dad has to leave around lunchtime to tend to a few things at the warehouse, and I find myself a pale, gelatinous pot pie in the hospital cafeteria and eat without tasting it. Thinking of the pot pie I made for Zenny a lifetime ago. Of making her eat it, watching her soft lips move enticingly over her fork. Of stripping her and tasting her and holding myself still with agonizing strain so she could explore every corner of my body.

And that memory spirals into every other night we shared, every other minute. The laughing, the teasing, the arguing. The discussions about God and poverty. The way I remembered more and more of my forgotten self with her.

How she made me think of the way light falls through stained glass.

That hole in my chest is huge now. Vacant, hungry, chewing through more and more of me, spreading from my heart to my eyes and my stomach and down to my wretched, selfish toes.

You fucked up royally.

The one time something good and pure and true landed in your life, you smothered it with greed, asshole.

Asshole is too good a word for me. I’m subhuman in my selfishness. I’m a rotting pile of shit with nothing to show for my life but an empty heart and a perfect head of hair. It’s dumb that I should have to confront this here, now; it’s weak and stupid that I can’t stave it off any longer, but who am I kidding? How long could I really have pretended to myself that I didn’t care? That I could feel nothing about the one thing in my miserable life that meant everything?

I love Zenny. And I lost her. All because I couldn’t stop being Sean Bell for one minute and look outside myself. All because I couldn’t put her first, not when it meant losing control. She’s gone and it’s my fault.

Okay, and maybe a little bit the Reverend Mother’s. She did say to tell Zenny, after all.

The good thing about hospital cafeterias is that no one looks at you twice when you start crying, which is what I do now, curling over my uneaten pot pie and letting the hole chew through the last remaining shreds of my soul.