“You have a brother,” I blurted.

“Yep,” he agreed, then started striding toward the bathroom.

I watched him do this. When he disappeared in it and I saw the light come on, but he didn’t close the door, I moved that way.

When I was in the door, I saw him bent over the sink, splashing water on his face.

“Baby, twenty years ago, he saved your life,” I said gently.

Abel turned off the taps and muttered, “Apparently.”

I watched him reach for the hand towel, nab it, and use it to dry his face.

“This is kinda huge news,” I pointed out.

He kept his eyes to the mirror as he said, “Kinda.”

“Okay, no,” I stated. “It’s not ‘kinda’ huge news, honey. You have a brother and he saved your life.” My voice had risen and it, or my words, finally got me his eyes.

“Went over that, Lilah. Now a coupla times.”

What was going on?

“You have no reaction?” I asked.

“What reaction do you want?” he asked back.

I threw out a hand. “I don’t know. Something.”

“He saved my life,” Abel declared.

“Yes, honey.”

“And they think he’s been lookin’ after me.”

“Yes,” I repeated.

Abel held my eyes and decreed, “He sucks at it.”

My head jerked. “I—”

Suddenly, he twisted his torso. Bunching up the hand towel, he threw it violently across the long vanity. It flew, opened, and fluttered, landing on the far edge of the other sink.

Just as suddenly, he twisted back to me and bit out, “All my life, thought I was a monster.”

There it was.

I started to move into the room.

Abel’s voice kept biting. “All my life, thought I was the only one, alone in who I was. Deviant. Abnormal. Wrong. Wondering where I came from. Wondering how I could even be.”

“Honey,” I whispered, getting close but stopping when his long legs took him a long step back.

“Watched people I love die. Not one. Not three. Generations of them. When I found the woman for me, didn’t know I could keep her alive.”

“Maybe your brother doesn’t know that either,” I suggested carefully.

“And maybe he does. At least if he’s lookin’ after me like they think, he saved my life, he knows what I am, what we both are, he knew he wasn’t alone.”

“Perhaps you should wait to be this angry after you hear what he has to say,” I offered, keeping up with my suggestions.

“And perhaps you know me enough to know that if I had a brother, I would not ever leave him hanging,” Abel shot back, and he was right. I knew him enough to know that for certain.

I lifted a hand toward him and said, “I don’t know what to say to make it better.”