Prom had been insane. I was seventeen and he had just turned twenty-three. Besides the fact that he was the oldest guy there and that would’ve been super weird, Brock was already quietly famous among those who watched the fights. Pretty sure he spent more time posing for photographs than we did dancing, but if I hadn’t been in love with him before, I fell hard and fast then.

He’d been like a brother to me up until, well, I started staring a little too long at the way his arms flexed or how his bottom lip was fuller than the top one. And then he’d gotten his first tattoo at seventeen, one of many, and I stopped thinking of him as a brother. He just never stopped seeing me as a little sister.

But tonight would be different.

“I’m ready,” I said out loud, to my reflection. “I’m more than ready.”

I had been ready that Saturday night, ready to change how things were between us, except that night ended with him . . . with him meeting the girl who would become his fiancée and me . . . with me ending up in the hospital, almost dead.

* * *

Grady was holding my hand as we walked out of the exhibit hall and into the rapidly cooling evening air of early October. It was later than I had thought I’d be out. We ended up grabbing a light dinner from one of the restaurants on German Street and then we’d stopped to get coffee before heading to the Center for Contemporary Arts.

It had been a nice night, really nice.

The conversation had been easy and it seemed like we never ran out of things to talk about. He told me about growing up in western Maryland and spending his summers helping his grandfather on their family farm and how he still went back there quite often. I explained what it was like to grow up in the Lima household. Even though he knew nothing about mixed martial arts or anything remotely like that, he was genuinely interested in what I had to say.

And now as we were walking to where we’d parked, my head was in a weird place. It was strange being back on the campus since I’d dropped out with three semesters left to graduate. Looking around now, with the students milling about between the dorms, I remembered what it was like before the weekend I came home and after I’d finally returned to college.

I found myself thinking about the time I learned that Brock was engaged to Kristen. Since I’d avoided keeping tabs on him, I was usually successful in zoning out my family whenever they talked about him. This time I hadn’t been so successful.