All That Really Matters by Nicole Deese (new books to read TXT) 📕

ache in my throat. The malicious countenance my memory had assigned to him for so many years had been replaced by a luminosity not even his most eloquent letter could have described.

“Brother.” A noun that spoke of so much more than name or blood.

His thick, tattooed neck depicted a history I’d only recently read, outlined on college-ruled paper. A life of choices and outcomes I could only relate to from afar. And yet, when those same inked arms crushed me into an embrace, my mind was far from our differences.

He pounded an open palm to my back. “I knew you would come. I told Peter you would. You just needed time.” To give me a chance were likely the words he held back. Words imprisoned by a younger brother who had never once responded to his pleas and confessions.

“It’s good to see you, Carlos,” I said. “You look good, healthy.” The fifty to sixty pounds he’d put on since I last saw him only added to the proof that his habits and lifestyle matched the change Peter had sworn to.

“Peter has us on a workout schedule. It’s a part of the program.”

Given the diameter of his biceps, I wondered if the program he spoke of took place in a weight room. “How is that going—the program?”

His eyes never strayed from my face, as if he, too, was having trouble seeing past the surreal factor of it all. “It’s been eight hundred and forty-two days since I started a new life. A sober life. A better life.”

Though I’d read about his last hit in his letters, after he’d traded two bags of Doritos for a bag of cocaine in the prison yard during the first year of his sentence, the number he spoke provoked a level of pride I didn’t know I was capable of feeling toward him. “That’s something to be proud of.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I used to hope I could make you proud of me one day.”

Words that seemed to crush my diaphragm into my ribcage. “You are making me proud.” I tried, and failed, to exhale the tension in my chest. But it was attached to a revelation of my own. “I didn’t read your letters, Carlos. Not a single one, until two nights ago, when I read them all.”

As if he was somehow expecting this, he nodded slowly. “Your mother told me to keep writing. Never to stop, not even if I never received one letter back from you. She said sometimes we need to write our story more than we need someone else to read it. She was right.”

My mind skipped back a beat, and then another, where it stuck on his phrasing. On the only obvious conclusion I could make. “My mother wrote to you? For how long?”

Carlos stared back, unblinking, as if this was an interaction he hadn’t expected. “Since my first letter to you after the trial. She sent me one letter for every letter I sent to you. You . . . didn’t know that?”

“No.” I shook my head, letting it soak in deep. For three years my mother wrote to my biological brother while he served time after an assault against her son. “But I’m glad she did.” My mother had done what I couldn’t. What I’d chosen not to do.

“She gave me hope when I couldn’t find it for myself.”

I swallowed the emotion rising in my throat. “She’s good at that.”

He nodded, his own throat bobbing. “I want to show you that I am what I say. That I’m changed. That my letters, they are all true.”

“I want that, too.” More than I ever believed possible. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

“No. No, Silas.” His meaty grip was firm on my shoulders as tears wet his face. He shook his head vehemently. “It’s your name at the top of my amends list. I’m the one who messed up. Not you.” He winced as his glance fell to the scar on my forearm. His expression was a mix of pain and hope, a sight that robbed me of my next breath. “I’ve never given you a reason to trust me.”

“You have now.” A statement that stripped the last of my protective armor bare. I wasn’t here to be the savior my brother hadn’t been to me. I was here because our Savior had been at work in us both.

“I hope, in time, you can forgive me for the pain I’ve caused you, your family.”

“I have, Carlos. I’ve forgiven you.”

It was a first step that felt more like a thousand, and yet it was the right place to start. Believing the worst was behind us, and that with time, accountability, counseling, boundaries, and trust . . . we could form a new kind of brotherhood.

Carlos tackled me into another embrace, and this time, I wasn’t the first to let go. Because all that we’d lost—the years of trauma, the years of addiction, the years of anger, neglect, and silence, had finally come to an end.

My big brother had come home, and I wouldn’t be the one to lock him out again.

35

Molly

If I had to choose a single month to relive for the rest of my life, these last four weeks would be a top contender. Between the hundreds of positive messages I’d received from followers responding to the livestream I did in Silas’ office, to attending an adoption hearing for Wren’s little brother, to rejoicing over the reunion of two estranged brothers and their subsequent meetups, to finalizing party preparations and talent selections with the residents and then convincing Val to take a week’s vacation with her son to fly out to The Event next weekend . . . my cheek muscles felt as if they’d doubled in size from all the smiling.

And there truly had been so much smiling.

Especially when Silas’s sexy shoulders were involved. My goodness! Who could have known how incredibly satisfying it was to watch a man work a pair of pruning shears in the sunshine?

“Earth to Molly,” Miles