“Was your dad happy his son would follow in his footsteps?”

Deacon shrugged. “I guess. He sent us there for two summers. While Dante came back full of ideas about future business-development plans, I came back rougher around the edges, which infuriated our mother. She obsessed about ‘my station in life,’ constantly berating me about acting like an heir to a multimillion-dollar business, not like a roughneck running the rigs. Dante could do no wrong in her eyes. He had a way with her. Hell, he had a way with all the girls. So it wasn’t just his looks that had girls flocking to him. We were identical, and girls weren’t falling all over themselves to get with me like they were with him.”

“So neither of you tried to look different and set yourself apart from the other?”

“Nah. I imagine we would’ve done that at some point, but we never got the chance.”

Molly’s bare feet shuffled across the carpet as she moved into his peripheral vision.

“The first week of junior year, I started dating Cassidy, much to everyone’s surprise.”

“Why?”

“She was a year older than me. A good girl. She’d been designated class sweetheart three times. I wasn’t a bad boy.” He shot her a quick look. “No tats, or a motorcycle, or shaved head at that time. But I’d gotten into trouble for fighting. She didn’t care. Before too long I was spending all my time with her, but Dante was cool with it. He always said, Brother, I got my own deal going on. Don’t worry about me. But I did. I never wanted him to feel left out.”

Maybe if you would’ve left him out, he’d be alive today.

“Anyway, that fall Cassidy was elected homecoming queen. I escorted her to the football game and took her to the dance. Since Dante didn’t have a date, he went to a party out in the boondocks. When Cassidy and I got there after the dance, Dante was drunk—not the norm for him. Usually Cassidy didn’t drink either, so I didn’t think anything of it when she went off with her friends. I stayed by the bonfire, listening to Dante’s drunk talk about a girl I’d never heard of. A girl he claimed he’d been having sex with since school started, which made me so mad . . .”

“Why?”

“Because he always told me everything right away. And he’d kept something that goddamn important from me for two months. So I’m grilling him about it, scheming on how I can get Cassidy in bed to even things up with my brother.” He closed his eyes. “That’s how I spent my last hour with him. Bein’ mad at him for losing his virginity first. Bein’ mad at him for pulling away from me because I knew that was the start of us having separate lives.”

“So did you leave him there so you could nail the homecoming queen?”

He snorted. “No. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen. I just . . . I had no interest in sex. That’ll make more sense later. Anyway, Cassidy stumbled back to the bonfire totally hammered. So I had to deal with my drunken brother and my drunken girlfriend.” Deacon turned around and looked Molly in the eye. “I hadn’t been drinking. Period. Not a fucking drop.”

“You must be making that distinction for a reason.”

He nodded and turned back toward the window. “The party was thirty miles out of town. When I realized it was two a.m. and we’d missed our curfew by an hour, I debated on whether to even go home or just stay at the campground, but it started to rain. So I poured the drunken duo into my truck, with Cassidy sitting in the middle. I told them to buckle up, but I’d been too focused on the fog rolling in to double-check if they’d listened to me. By then they’d both passed out anyway.”

He clenched his fists. “I don’t even know how it happened. One second the truck was on the road, and the next it spun out of control, plowed through the ditch, and headed straight for a tree. The impact knocked me out. When I came to, I didn’t see Cassidy or Dante. I thought they’d gotten out. Everything was hazy. I noticed the windshield was gone. In the headlights I saw Dante suspended in midair outside the truck and Cassidy’s legs on the hood. I couldn’t see the rest of her.” The immediate sick feeling threatened to choke him. He swallowed the bile and kept going, wanting to get through this. “Later I learned Dante had been thrown into a barbed-wire fence and had died instantly. Same with Cassidy, only her body hadn’t made it past the hood.

“I don’t remember the ambulance guys pulling me out. The impact with the steering wheel had broken two of my ribs, punctured my lung, and caused internal bleeding, requiring emergency surgery. So I didn’t actually wake up until almost forty-eight hours after the accident. My first conscious thought was Dante is dead.”