Page 137 of Rules Of Engagement: St. Louis
“Everything okay?” Elijah asked.
“Your health is fine, right?” Xander added.
“My health is fine. That’s not...” Dad rubbed his face, looking older than I’d seen him in years. “This is about family. I need to tell you all something.”
My stomach dropped. Since we’d found out about Titan in Miami, I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. For more secrets to surface from Dad’s complicated romantic history.
“Is this about Titan?” I asked. “Because we’re still working on building that relationship, and?—”
“It’s not about Titan.” Dad took a deep breath. “Well, not just about Titan. Boys, you have another brother.”
Xander’s fork clattered against his plate. Elijah went completely still, and I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was.
“Another brother?” Xander asked.
“His name is Jeremiah Valentine. He’s thirty years old, he lives in Detroit, and...” he rubbed his lips together. “I want you to meet him.”
We were all shocked. Another brother. We were still trying to figure out how to integrate Titan into our family, and here he comes with another secret revelation.
“Dad,” Elijah said, “how many more brothers do we have?”
“That’s it. I swear to you that’s all of them.” He scratched his head. “I think.”
Our eyes widened.
“I mean,” he said, “The ladies, they love me, I?—”
“Dad?”
He held his hands up. “Titan and Jeremiah. No more surprises.”
My brothers and I glanced at each other.
“At this point, we’re going to have to do a genealogy test to make sure,” I said.
Dad looked at each of us in turn. “I’ve spent the last few months getting to know Jeremiah, trying to figure out how to tellyou boys about him. He’s a good man. A teacher. He deserves to know his family.”
I stared at my father, processing this information alongside everything I knew about Titan. Two brothers we’d grown up without knowing existed. Two men who shared our blood but not our history, products of Dad’s inability to commit and his tendency to keep secrets.
“Does he know about us?” I asked. “And Titan?”
“He knows about all of you. Titan too. They’ve actually been in contact.”
“They know each other?” Elijah’s voice rose.
“They’ve known about each other for a while. Jeremiah reached out to Titan a few months ago. They’re... figuring things out together.”
While we’d been struggling to build a relationship with Titan, dealing with his walls and justified anger about being kept from us, he’d been connecting with another brother we didn’t even know existed.
“Before you feel slighted by Titan, understand that he feels like he has more in common with Jeremiah because they’re both estranged from me. So it was easier for him to have a conversation with Jeremiah.”
While that did make sense, it didn’t make it any better.
“And they both want to meet with us?” Xander asked.
“Jeremiah does, very much. Titan...” Dad paused, rubbing his face. “You know how Titan is. He’s still working through his feelings about all of this. But Jeremiah thinks if we all got together, it might help.”
I thought about our last interaction with Titan in Miami. The guarded conversations, the flashes of longing underneath his armor, his struggle between wanting family and expecting disappointment.
“What do you think?” I asked my brothers.
“I think,” Xander said slowly, “that we need to meet Jeremiah and figure out how to include both of them in this family. Even if it’s complicated.”
Elijah nodded. “Maybe having Jeremiah there will help with Titan. Maybe seeing all of us together will show him he really does belong.”
“That’s it then,” I said. “Let’s reach out to schedule our first brother reunion.”
