She takes one last drag on her cigarette and then throws it at his feet. “Sean? You think I wronged you both? I’ll have you know when your brother got out, he came straight to me. I was the one who took him in, who took care of him. You were too busy here to even write him or visit.”

Silas freezes and his voice is softer when he asks, “Sean is out? I thought he had another year?”

She laughs bitterly. “Out on parole last year.”

“Last year?” For the first time, Silas sounds wounded by this conversation that’s been full of barbs from the moment he opened the door. “Where is he now?”

“Back inside. Decided to rob a liquor store three months into his parole.”

Silas swears, and looks back at me. I can’t read his expression in the dark, but I have a feeling he doesn’t want me to hear any of this. This is the past he left behind, the one he refuses to talk to me about.

His mother’s voice actually breaks as she says, “I know I left. I’m sorry about that, baby. I am. But you left us, too. If you’d been there when Sean got out, maybe he would have stayed straight.”

It’s a long time before Silas answers, and the tone he uses is completely unfamiliar to me. Low. Hurt. “Listen, I’m sorry your boyfriend is in jail and you don’t have the money to make bail,” but I can’t help you. You or Sean. You’ll just have to learn to take care of your own problems, like I always had to.”

“Don’t you look down on me. Like you’re better than me when I made you. A better man would take care of his mother. A better man wouldn’t cut ties with his family. Don’t come crawling back to me when you end up like your brother, like your father, like every damn man I’ve ever known.”

“Last chance.” He lifts his phone in warning, but he sounds tired. So tired. “I don’t want to call the cops on you, but I will.”

“You ungrateful—”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

When he starts dialing, she walks away cursing. He stands there in the yard until she starts her car and pulls away.

I wait for him to come back up to the house, but he doesn’t. He stays, rigid and still. And even though he’s a full-grown man, tall and broad, he looks so small to me then. Like a boy. A boy who had to grow up entirely too fast.

I go to him. And when I place my hand on his back, he tenses and jerks away from my touch. He turns, and he looks similar to the night we first met. He’s not bruised or bleeding, but he’s locked up tight. Angry.

“You should go.”

Then he takes off, striding toward the door fast enough that I have to jog to catch him.

“Silas, wait!”

He jerks to a stop at the top of the porch stairs, and spins around to look down at me.

“You want to know what I’m afraid of? That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s what’s waiting for me if I can’t make football work.”

“No, it’s not—”

“Yes, it is. I can clean up, play nice with you at animal shelters and construction projects, but that’s just me pretending. I’m always going to be the guy who wears jeans to fancy parties and who gets in screaming fights on his front lawn. My first inclination will always be to work things out with my fists. I might do my damnedest to hold it back, but it will always be in me. And I don’t fit in your world. You couldn’t even introduce me to your parents tonight, and that was before all this.”

“I thought—I thought I was doing you a favor. I thought it would freak you out to meet my parents. You don’t do relationships, and that—”

“You’re right. I don’t. I thought maybe I could, but it would only have been a matter of time before I was the one suffocating in your world. Let’s face it . . . you and I, we don’t match. Never have. Never will.”

This is all spiraling out of control faster than I can keep up with. And I feel the urge to grab him, to hold on tight because I’m losing him, but it feels like I’m losing so much more. Something too big to name.

“Silas, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of it to come across like this. I’m sorry.”

He gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and there’s this racket in my chest called a heartbeat and it’s so wild, so frantic I can barely hear over the sound.

“Still so damn polite.”

Then he crosses to his front door, walks inside, and closes the door with a quiet, calm click.

Shutting me out.

And I don’t know if breakup is the right word but it feels like that. Bigger than that actually. This time isn’t like Henry. I don’t feel relieved.

I feel sliced open and short of breath and . . . sorry. So very sorry.

Chapter 25

Silas

First day of school is shit. Complete and utter shit.

Everybody knows about the suspension, and they all want to talk about it, want to know what happened, and how it’s going to affect the first game.

They all expect me to be riled up about it . . . to want to talk. But it’s not the suspension that’s got my head all twisted up. It’s Dylan.

I couldn’t sleep last night because my bed still smells like her. Can’t take a f**king shower without imagining the look on her face when she came apart around my fingers that first night in that room. Even my goddamn truck belongs to her now.

All of it. She’s in everything.

I realize when I show up for my first class why Dylan’s name seemed familiar the night we met. The Brenner-Gibson building. Her family has a f**king building named after them, and I’m tempted to drop the class just for that reason.

I stick to the back rows during my classes, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt because I’ve got less than zero f**ks to give about first-day-of-school bullshit. I’m in the mood to be pissed, and the world seems all too happy to give me plenty of reasons.

I head to the athletic complex to join the 11 A.M. workout, and Coach Gallt is the coach on duty. Keyon is there, too. So of course, I deal with an hour of having my nose rubbed into the fact that I’m not playing this Saturday. Or the next one.

And to make things worse . . . Dylan ends up being in my one o’clock history class. Her hair is down and straightened, and it keeps drawing my eye all through class. She’s about four rows down directly in front of me, and she keeps finding reasons to look back. She stretches. Then she drops her pencil. Then she checks the clock at the back of the lecture hall. And those looks have me so on edge, I don’t know whether I want to walk out or take her with me or yell at her or kiss her. I just know I can’t take those eyes on me.