his chair, contemplating Conall. “I heard Mom sobbing in the kitchen. There were broken dishes all over the floor. I sneaked upstairs and— I don’t remember why I even checked your room, but you were huddled in bed.”
“That sounds like the time I’m thinking of.” Conall took a swallow of coffee, striving for a ruefully reminiscent tone. “They were fighting when I got home. Seeing me tipped them over the edge. I guess they thought I’d stayed upstairs. I heard her yelling at him that she had never wanted me, that he was the one who insisted they have another kid. He bellowed that I had to be her fault, that he didn’t believe I was his. He couldn’t see himself in me.”
Duncan bit off a harsh obscenity. “I knew something worse than usual was wrong.” Breathing hard, he bent his head for a moment. “You believed them, didn’t you?”
“What wasn’t to believe?” There. He’d pulled the tone off perfectly. “I think she did love you. Maybe Niall some. Me, not at all. I always knew that.”
“No.”
Conall didn’t know if he’d ever heard so much anger in one word. “What?”
“It’s not true. She did love you early on, before things got so bad with him. She pulled back from all of us after that. Niall, too. Why do you think he started getting in so much trouble?”
Was it true? Not that his mother had loved him—Conall really didn’t give a damn anymore—but that she hadn’t picked out him alone to reject? “I didn’t think about it,” he admitted. “I was a mess.”
“I’ve never seen anyone as angry as you.” Duncan sounded troubled. “Later, you got so slick no one saw below the surface. Teachers couldn’t say enough about you, you took the baseball team to the only championship they’ve had before or since—”
Conall laughed at that. “Really?”
They exchanged brief, wry grins.
“Really. Our sports teams suck.” Duncan returned to his point. “You had the girls eating out of your hand—”
“And other parts of my body,” Conall murmured.
Duncan chuckled, but continued, “I’d look into your eyes and I never saw any real emotion at all. I couldn’t tell if you’d tamped all that anger down like gunpowder that was going to catch a spark someday, or whether you were absolutely fine and I was imagining that you were a zombie and not the brother I remembered.”
A zombie? Was that what he’d been? Conall couldn’t decide whether to be amused or disconcerted.
“A zombie.” He tried it out on his tongue. “I think it was a little of both,” he finally admitted. “I tried like hell to believe I didn’t feel anything for anyone. Underneath…I’m pretty sure that kid who didn’t have anything but his pride and his anger was alive and kicking.”
His brother sighed. “I suspected that.”
“Maybe that’s where it gets weird. I don’t think anything changed until a few weeks ago.”
“When you came home.”
“Yeah.”
Duncan swallowed. “You didn’t want to come.”
“Hell, no.”
“You were still pissed at me.”
He grunted his agreement.
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know.” All those unidentifiable emotions felt like bits of flying grit, abrasive enough to scour glass. “I started seeing you—everyone—differently.”
His brother’s clear, often cool eyes—so much like his own—had softened with what might be compassion. “My suspicion,” he said, “is that the way you thought about me and the past was habit. Nothing else. You got home, looked around and realized somewhere in there you’d grown up and the man you are has only a passing resemblance to the kid who left town carrying his resentment like a backpack he couldn’t put down.”
Unblinking, Conall stared at him. Was that true? Had he been so damned oblivious he didn’t notice how he’d changed? Had he changed that much?
“I’ve been living my life based on vows I made the day I left home,” he heard himself say. “I wasn’t going to let anyone close. No wife, no kids, didn’t want family. Didn’t believe in forgiveness.”
Duncan only laughed. “Sounds like a teenager, doesn’t it?”
Jarred, Conall thought. God. It did. Melodrama city. “Still not so sure about the family ties,” he admitted. “I’d be a hell of a husband or father, with my job.”
Duncan made a noncommittal sound. Dished up some coleslaw.
“I’m not thinking about anything like that anyway. It’s the good ol’ days that have been on my mind.”
“Uh-huh.”
His eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You sound like me when I met Jane.”
Conall tensed. “What are you talking about?”
“Lia. Those boys. Seems to me you’d make a fine father, not to mention husband.”
He