Before I knew it, I found myself outside, closing the front door behind me as I sucked in huge gulps of breath that battled my lingering headache for attention. Silent tears—the worst ones—poured out of my eyes as my throat seemed to swell to twice its size. I plopped down on the first step, the palm of my hand going toward my forehead instantly, and I curled into myself as if trying to keep this pain from flaring to power. My nose burned and it was hard to breathe, but the tears kept right on coming.

Life was unfair and it always had been. It was nothing personal. I knew that. I’d seen that mentioned in the pamphlets I’d read on grief after Drigo died. But knowing all that didn’t help for shit.

Grief never got any easier. I never missed my brother any less. Part of me accepted that nothing would ever fill the void his death had left in my life or the boys or my parents or even the Larsens.

Snot poured out of my nostrils like it was on tap, and I didn’t make a single sound or bother cleaning myself up.

He’d had two kids, a wife, a house, and a job he’d enjoyed. He’d only been thirty-two when he’d died. Thirty-two. In less than three years, I’d be thirty-two. I still felt like I had my entire life ahead of me. He had to have thought the same thing.

But he hadn’t had years left. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. Just like that.

God, I missed his stupid jokes and his bossiness and stubbornness so much. I missed how much he gave me shit and never let me live anything down. He’d been more than my brother. More than my friend. More than the person who taught me to drive and helped me pay for cosmetology school. He’d taught me so much about everything. And the things he taught me the best came after he’d died.

Only he could manage that.

I would gladly go back to being a selfish, self-centered idiot with awful taste in men if I could only have him back.

I missed him. So. Fucking. Much.

“You all right?” a voice carried itself over, damn near scaring the shit out of me.

Without wiping my face or nose, I looked up, confused and totally caught off guard that someone had walked up without me noticing. My chest was puffing in soundless whimpers and my throat constricted. Yet I shook my head at Dallas who was standing at the bottom of the steps leading up to my deck and told him the truth. “Not really.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” His tone was so soft that it seemed to reach deeper than his concern and presence did. “I didn’t know somebody could cry and not make a noise.” The frown on his serious face deepened as his eyes scanned over me. That notch between his eyebrows was back again.

My sniffle in response was watery and a total mess, and without realizing I was doing it, I had my bottom lip sucked into my mouth like that would help stop me from crying even more. It wasn’t really helping when tears kept streaming down my eyes and cheeks, falling off my jaw no matter how much my brain told my tear ducts to quit it.

“Your head still hurt?” he asked in that eggshell-like voice.

I shrugged, wiping at the wet places on my skin. It did hurt, but it didn’t hurt worse than my heart right then.

“Something happen with the boys?”

I shook my head again, still too afraid to use words because I was sure I’d cry my eyes out in front of this man, and I didn’t really want that to happen.

He glanced over his shoulder again, that big hand of his going to the back of his neck before he faced me again with a sigh. “If there’s something you wanna talk about…” He scrubbed at the side of his cheek, awkward or resigned or both or neither; I couldn’t blame him—I didn’t want to feel this way. Not now, not ever, and especially not with witnesses who had thought so badly of me in the beginning. “I can keep my mouth shut,” he finally got out, making me look up at him. A small smile crossed that hard face of his, so unexpected I didn’t know how to handle it.

Tell him? This near complete stranger? I was supposed to say words and sentences to him that I couldn’t even share with my parents? How could I even begin to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to me? How did you explain that your brother died, and that the next thing you knew, your life was going up into flames, and you didn’t know how to put out the fire because the smoke from it was so thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you?

I wasn’t some closed-off person who didn’t know how to share her feelings, but this was different. Way different than having someone overhear me arguing with my mom. I could come back from her words. I was scared I’d never be able to come back from the Rodrigo-sized gap my brother had left me with.

“I’m not… I’m not….” I couldn’t get the words out. They were jumbled and messy, and I couldn’t unscramble them in one breath. I wheezed. “I—I hate this. I’m not trying to get a pity party or attention or anything—”

My neighbor dropped his head back, the long line of his lightly bearded throat bobbed. “I told you earlier, I know,” he was still talking low. “I thought we agreed to put it behind us?”

I sniffled.

Dallas sighed again as he dropped his chin, meeting my gaze with those hazel-green eyes. “You gotta stop crying,” my neighbor said in a gentle voice that broke the camel’s back.

I wanted to tell him “okay,” but I couldn’t even manage to get that one single word out from how much I was hiccupping, unable to catch my breath.

“I’m no snitch.”