I wish she’d stop looking at me like that, because it’s making me feel all the things I haven’t let myself feel, except in the smallest fits and starts.

“I got a DNA test, and, yeah, he’s not mine. So I left. Moved out. Quit the GED course. Starting missing work again, calling in sick, bailing out on charters, like nothing had changed. Like Justin had never been—”

I cut myself off before my voice can break.

“Brody.”

I wave her off. “It’s okay, Rachel.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not okay.”

“But what am I supposed to do about it?” I ask, with a bitter laugh. “I have to let it go.”

“It’s so unfair.” Outrage tightens her voice. “You were trying so hard to be a better person, and you got punished for it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”

She looks away, staring at the River Runs Through It poster blankly. Then turns back.

“Connor knows?”

I nod. “He’s the only one who knows the whole story. Connor’s always had faith in me, even when pretty much no one else did. From the minute I dropped out he tried to convince me to get my GED. He was convinced if I did, I could join him at college. He tried so hard to talk me into it. I kept telling him I didn’t have what it took, and he kept telling me I was full of it.”

“And with your dad gone and your mom so sick when you were in high school, it probably felt like no one at home cared.”

“Gabe was taking care of my mom and trying to save the business. And I was the fuckup who made it harder on both of them. I can’t tell you how many times one of them had to bail me out of my own shit.”

Her face darkens. “You were a hurting fourteen-year-old boy. What teenager who’d just lost his dad wouldn’t be a mess?”

She says it so vehemently, I almost believe it. But then I remember my dad asking Gabe to run the business and take care of the family. Gabe asking Clark to run the business if he had to move to Boston.

Zoë saying she and Justin would be better off with Len after he left his wife because he was a hardworking guy with a real job.

“I get it,” Rachel says quietly. “Why you value your friendship with Connor so much. If he’s the one guy who’s ever seen you for the man you really are.”

It feels like she’s smacked me in the middle of the chest. In a good way, but also—it hurts.