For a moment, he looked less angry than devastated.
“You were supposed to be my brother.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know!” he shouted. “You don’t know what it’s like to watch your entire family fall apart and then discover that your best friend wants the one person you’re trying to protect!”
I had no answer that could make that moment easier.
Three months earlier, I would have thought such a conversation was impossible. Karen Mercer was Daniel’s mother. She was the woman who had fed me when I was broke, remembered my birthday when my own relatives forgot, and once drove through a snowstorm to rescue Daniel and me after we got stranded two hours from home.
She was forty-eight years old.
I was twenty-eight.
She had been married to Daniel’s father for twenty-two years.
And I had spent most of my adult life believing that some boundaries were so obvious they didn’t need to be discussed.
