“I don’t think sympathy’s the right word.” Abruptly weary, he dropped his forehead to hers. He was tired of fighting demons, of trying to find answers. “Damn.”

Uncertain, she stood very still. “Are you all right?”

“No. No, I’m not.” He moved away from her to walk to the end of the path where a plot of tiny orange flowers poked up through white gravel. “A lot of things you said today were true. A lot of things you’ve said all along are true. I can’t do anything about them.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say now.”

“Nothing.” Hideously tired, he ran both hands over his face. “I’m trying to live with the fact that my brother’s dead, and that he was murdered because he decided to make some easy money drug-trafficking. He had a good brain, but he always chose to use it in the wrong way. Every time I look in the mirror, I wonder why.”

Liz was beside him before she could cut off her feelings. He hurt. It was the first time she’d seen below the surface to the pain. She knew what it was like to live with pain. “He was different, Jonas. I don’t think he was bad, just weak. Mourning him is one thing—blaming yourself for what he did, or for what happened to him, is another.”

He hadn’t known he needed comfort, but her hand resting on him had something inside him slowly uncurling. “I was the only one who could reach him, keep him on some kind of level. There came a point where I just got tired of running both our lives.”

“Do you really believe you could have prevented him from doing what he did?”

“Maybe. That’s something else I have to live with.”

“Just a minute.” She took his shirtfront in much the same way she had that afternoon. There was no sympathy now, but annoyance on her face. He hadn’t known he needed that, as well. “You were brothers, twins, but you were separate people. Jerry wasn’t a child to be guided and supervised. He was a grown man who made his decisions.”

“That’s the trouble. Jerry never grew up.”

“And you did,” she tossed back. “Are you going to punish yourself for it?”

He’d been doing just that, Jonas realized. He’d gone home, buried his brother, comforted his parents and blamed himself for not preventing something he knew in his heart had been inevitable. “I have to find out who killed him, Liz. I can’t set the rest aside until I do.”

“We’ll find them.” On impulse, she pressed her cheek to his. Sometimes the slightest human contact could wash away acres of pain. “Then it’ll be over.”