Page 41 of Last Chance Love

He smiled, but his eyes stayed on the sky as he softly said, “I did better with Ray, though.”

And now that little boy who had cried his head off until his big brother showed up and did his best to help him…was dead. I remembered Ian, a ball of energy, a mouth that ran on a seemingly infinite battery, and one of the brightest smiles I’d ever seen. He’d been attached to Leon in ways Ray had never been, and the bond between them had been tight.

“Oh, Leon,” I said softly, unable to help myself. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, I didn’t do too well after that,” he said with a little laugh, shaking his head. It didn’t dispel the misery in his eyes, but it did take away the wateriness. “Lost control of shit. Ray was nineteen and up in Austin for university.”

“So, you didn’t have anyone around to take care of, to anchor you.”

“And I lost control. Only stopped when I found myself standing before a judge, realizing I was going to prison.”

I wanted to ask, but I kept my mouth shut and instead asked, “And Ray?”

“Oh! He’s doinggreat,” Leon said, surprising me with his sudden heat and venom. “He’s never been better.”

“Uh, sarcasm?”

“No, last I checked, he was living the best life. Graduated with honors, got a great job as a private nurse, got his own house a few years ago, found a guy who, I guess treats him right,” he said, the bitterness only growing. “They got married last year.”

The phrasing was odd, but combined with his tone, I started to suspect what might have happened. “You found all this out secondhand, didn’t you?”

His bitterness spread into a mirthless smile. “How could you tell?”

“What happened?” I asked softly.

He sighed. “Ray was always different to Ian. I don’t know what it was, but I could never reach him like I could Ian. There was always this huge gap between us that I could never get across. I didn’t even know where to start.”

That tracked, I remembered Ray just as much. He had been quiet and introspective, more prone to sitting alone with a book, his phone, or his thoughts. He had never really liked being around people and always listened to Leon with an air of disdain and a silent attitude. It wasn’t that he was a bad kid or mean to others, but there wassomethingthere that had been slightly off-putting to me that I had attributed to hormones and an otherwise shitty life at home with his parents.

“After Ian, I wasn’t in any place to reach him. We grew increasingly distant, practically rocketing apart from one another. I started getting up to some bullshit, and he was getting his shit together,” Leon said with a shake of his head. “I want to be mad at him because now I’m being treated the same way we treated our parents, but how can I blame him? I was making a mess of what little I had, but he was smart enough to get out when he could.”

“Leon,” I began, suddenly frustrated that I couldn’t reach out and take his hand. Sure, I probably could have, but it would have looked weird, and everyone was already making jokes about us being together. I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. “Unless something changed when I wasn’t around, or you were secretly horrible to them, you were the best parent you could be for those two. You sacrificeda lotto give them a better life than you had. You’re allowed to be upset that he’s treating you like a stranger.”

Leon gave a shrug that infuriated me. I knew he was probably telling himself he deserved to be locked up because he’d screwed up his life, but I’d bet Ray had been looking for a way out long before Leon went off the deep end. It was shitty, in my opinion, to look at someone who tried their best and then turn your back when they started to fall apart.

It wasn’t like I thought Leon was a perfect parent. Christ, he’d started caring for them when he was still in single digits. There was more than enough room for errors. But Ray had been old enough to understand that his brother had done the best he could with the shittiest hand in existence. But then, Ray and Ian had been as different as night in day. I suppose it only made sense it was the same with this.

“Look,” Leon said, “what’s important is that he’s doing well, okay? The whole point of everything was to make sure they had good lives, better than the one I had. Even if…even if I’m not a part of his life anymore, I can see he has a good one. That’s enough.”

I wanted to ask him what that meant for his life now and if he could finally start living for himself, but I kept my mouth shut. It was neither the time nor the place to have that discussion. Hell, if I’d known what floodgates I was opening, I wouldn’t have asked after his brothers in the first place.

“Sorry to have brought that up,” I told him with a wince. “That’s…not easy to deal with.”

“No, it’s not,” he said with a small laugh that sounded a little closer to humorous than the last ones. “But I don’t know. That was easier to talk about than I thought it would be. Maybe because I’ve just…not told anyone else about that shit.”

“Really?” I asked in surprise. “Even in the intake evaluations?”

Everyone marked as a candidate for the program was given evaluations while they were still in prison. I didn’t know their purpose, but it wasn’t hard to guess. They wanted to ensure anyone they brought in would be a good fit and they hadn’t gone ‘wrong’ in prison. Family history would have been brought up in at least one of the evaluations.

“Eh, the shrink asked about my family. Told her I had a brother still alive, and one that had passed a couple of years before. And that I didn’t talk to my remaining brother or my parents,” he said with a shrug. “She asked about Ian, but either it wasn’t all that interesting a topic, or she let me not talk about it.”

“Huh, so why tell me?” I asked.

He looked up with a frown of confusion. “Seriously?”

“What?” I asked with a little laugh. “Is it this face? Does it invite trust?”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re ridiculous. I don’t know, maybe because even with everything…weird between us, I still trust you with some shit. And maybe because…I mean, some people can understand what it means to lose a sibling, and some might even understand what it means to lose someone who’s both your sibling and like a son. But no one knows what it means tomelike you would.”

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