“During your counselling, she gave you nothing?” I asked.

“Once the dread sock situation was outed, she’s hardly said anything in our sessions. Once a week she sits there barely moving with her arms crossed on her chest and her eyes to her knees. Her expression doesn’t even change. I lay it out. I even throw out the ugly just to see if I can get her to react to something. Nothing, MeeMee. It’s so bad even our counselor suggested a trial separation, and I think she did in an effort to put me out of my misery. The fuck of that is it’s humiliating. In fact, the whole fucking thing is humiliating.”

I hated that.

I hated that for my glorious big brother Lawrie.

He was not short like me. He was tall and straight and lean and commanding, like my dad.

But he had great, thick, dark hair that now had silver in it that was attractive (which was like mine, without the dye job and highlights, obviously).

And we shared our hazel eyes.

He got my father’s cut, angular, masculine bone structure that started forming and defining when he was fifteen. So since then, to when he met Mariel, he’d had to beat them off with a stick.

He loved his sons.

He was the youngest attorney in the history of his firm to make partner.

He made a ton of money and just had a ton of money.

He was smart. He had a great sense of humor.

And I remembered. I remembered the way he used to be with her. How she’d walk into the room and everything about him would change. The way he told her she was beautiful, and it wasn’t a throwaway compliment she could settle into, but he did it, each time I heard it, like he meant it and he wanted it to mean something to her.

I also remembered the way he stood at the altar at the church and watched her walk to him with this look of happy, expectant certainty like he just knew their lives would be beauty from that day until they left the earth.

This was why I hated her.

Because she became my mother when he did not become our father, and then she became worse than my mother and doing it, proved him wrong.

“You’re welcome, with the boys, without them, with her, or without,” I assured him. “You’re welcome anytime, Lawrie.”

“Thanks, MeeMee.”

“And I’m so sorry,” I repeated.