Together with Callum, Brady walked the sorry sack right on outside. It took until the cab pulled up a few minutes later—driven by Dave Right, a retired army vet who absolutely hated mean drunks—for Brady and Callum to calm Derrick down. Once he was pushed inside and on his way, Callum strung together a series of words so bad that Brady instinctively looked around for his mother and a bar of soap.

“This is going to wreck her,” he said when coming up for air. Callum lowered his voice but made sure Brady was listening. “Sloane told me that story after I found her crying in her room later that night. She had just gotten over food poisoning and had felt sick all day, but that dumbass was dressing up the whole first-time thing so much that she felt she had to do it then. She was mortified. Imagine your first time with him and then that happening? The best I could do to make her feel better was never talk about it again.”

Callum was so mad, he was spitting. But he was hurting, too. For his sister.

“She may be pretending that all her embarrassing stories she has out in the world don’t bother her that much, but all she’s done is just gotten really good at hiding it.” Callum went from mad to serious in a heartbeat. “Our parents died out of nowhere. They just went out to the store and never came back. Sloane was fifteen and just starting to date and get really close to people, you know? But after that? She disconnected. It was all Emma and I could do to keep her talking to us. After some time passed, she got better, but it was never the same. She’d make these relationships but then hold back. I think that’s why she really started the blog. A way to say all the things she kept herself from saying, like she was protecting herself. Yeah, I admit I was ticked she kept it from me, too, and kept the secret of you, for that matter, but I’m so proud of her for taking the leap to make that blog public. To put herself out there. To finally make ‘Guy’ hers.”

Callum flipped on a dime. He was back to mad.

“And then people like Carol and Derrick Fucking Kennerly try to ruin that.”

Brady shook his head. He’d had no idea.

He couldn’t imagine losing his parents so young and especially at the same time. Yet Sloane had, and she’d survived it. What’s more, she was now a woman who was kind, empathetic, and had a knack for making even the grumpiest of men laugh. Sloane cared about people, even though she had a reason to hide away from the world and not give a damn if she wanted to use it.

The heat in Brady cooled. He wasn’t mad like her brother.