“You know if Dallas lives here?” the woman asked.

“Dallas?” I made a face. What the hell was she talking about? We were in Austin.

“Dal-las,” the woman said slowly like I was an idiot or something.

I was still making a face at her, thinking she was the idiot. “You mean Austin?”

“No, Dallas. D-a-l-l—”

“I know how to spell Dallas,” I told her slowly. “Is that supposed to be a person?” Either that or she really was an idiot.

Pinching her lips that matched the color of her car together, she nodded.

Oh. “I don’t know anyone named Dallas,” I answered back in a tone nearly as snappy as hers as I walked down the steps. What kind of a name or nickname was Dallas anyway?

“About this height, green eyes, brown hair….” She trailed off when I didn’t say anything. That sounded suspiciously like a description of half the men in the world, including both of the men I’d seen at the house. The one who had gotten beaten up had dark blond hair but some people might think it was brown.

More than anything though, how was I supposed to know who she was talking about even if it was one of them? I didn’t know their names. Even if it was the beat-up guy, I didn’t want to get sucked in to some stranger’s life more than I already had. That guy just seemed like a bunch of drama I didn’t need or want in my life. The other one… well, I didn’t want or need that in my life either, even if he did have an incredible body. “Don’t you live around here?” she asked, still using that snarky voice that called to my inner attitude like a siren.

I bit the inside of my cheek as I walked down the path, telling myself I couldn’t pick a fight less than two weeks after moving in. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was going to live here for a long time, I hoped. I couldn’t be starting some kind of beef so soon. But my voice backstabbed me, coming out exactly how I was feeling. “Yeah, I do, but I haven’t lived here long, sorry.”

I think the woman might have stared at me for a moment from the silence between us, but I really couldn’t tell. I heard her sigh. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been calling this asshole all day, and he won’t answer. I heard he was living here.”

I shrugged, my temper starting to ease at her apology. Technically, even if my neighbor was named Dallas, or Wichita or San Francisco, I didn’t know that and therefore didn’t know a Dallas, so I wasn’t lying. Plus, I could barely keep track of my own schedule, much less someone else’s. I tried to think of Beat-up Dumbass’s face, but could only get a clear image of all that horrible bruising while he’d been lying on the recliner. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone.”

With a long and aggravated sigh, the woman dipped her head just as I got within a foot of her car, close enough to really see her face. She might have been older than me, but she was really pretty. Her face was oval, her makeup perfectly done, and she was wearing skintight clothing on a curvy body, even I could appreciate. Once upon a time, I’d put on makeup and curled my hair just to go to the grocery store. Now, unless I had to work or was going someplace where pictures were going to be taken, it wasn’t happening.

“All right, thanks, honey,” the strange woman finally said. With that, she ducked back into her car.

Honey? She couldn’t be that much older than me.

For one brief second, I wondered if the man who had gotten beat up was this Dallas person, then pictured the other man—the bigger one—clearly in my head, and then I shoved the curiosity aside. I had other things to worry about than the neighbor and his might-be friend. Back inside my house, I found my mom in the living room alongside my dad, hanging up picture frames.

Sure enough, the second I closed the door behind me, my mom’s eyes swept over the empty bags I held in my hands. “You gave them all away?”

I gave the plastic in my hands a squeeze so they crinkled. “Yes.”

My mom bobbled her head, mocking me. “Que te dije? No me hagas esa cara.”

I let my smirk fall off my face a little slower than she would have liked.

We worked alongside each other in peace for the next few hours, hanging frames and some of my best friend’s artwork I’d collected over the years. Neither of my parents said anything when we pulled out the framed photographs of Drigo and Mandy. I didn’t want the boys to forget their parents. I didn’t want to stuff their memories into a box so that I wouldn’t feel that pull of sadness every time I remembered what we had all lost. What I did notice was my dad looking at a picture of the entire family at my high school graduation with this intense expression on his face, but he didn’t say a word about it.

Neither one of my parents ever wanted to talk about my brother.

Every once in a while, when I was at the really low point where every cell in my body missed Rodrigo and got mad that I would never see my brother again, I’d wish that I could bring him up, that I could talk to them about it. But if there was one thing I’d learned over the course of the last few years, it was that everyone dealt with grief differently. Hell, we all dealt with life differently.

My mom eventually made dinner with the pitiful ingredients I had in the fridge and pantry, we ate, and they took off. They lived almost an hour away in San Antonio, in the same subdivision as one of my aunts and uncles. After twenty-something years in El Paso, they had sold my childhood home and moved to be closer to my dad’s family. I had been living in Fort Worth at that time; for eight years that had been my home. Their moving and my ex were the reasons why I’d left Fort Worth and moved to San Antonio before I got the boys. It had been my decision to move to Austin with Josh and Louie to have another fresh start.