You Were Never My Brother

He was six years old when he found me in a field and carried me home. He raised me to eighteen on nothing but his fists.

Three days after the Ashfords claimed me, my bleachblond big brother told me he didn't want me anymore. Growing up, he was my mother and my father both.

If I'd asked him for the moon, he'd have gone looking for a ladder. His crew said he was spoiling me rotten. He'd just talk around the pretzel stick hanging off his lip. "My sister?

She's sweet as hell.

How bad could she get?" This time he wouldn't even turn around. "I was never really your brother anyway." "Don't come looking for me again." I stared at his back and smiled. Fine.

Then we're not brother and sister anymore. You have no idea how bad I can get, big brother.

Chapter 1 I found Cade Doyle crouched on the floor of the pool hall with his guys. "Boss, I heard Vic passed you a cigarette the other day and your sister saw it." The new kid was doing the talking. "Heard she beat the hell out of you when you got home." "That's not right, though.

Little girl you've been feeding all these years, and she talks to you like—" "You don't know shit." Cade cut him off with a smack to the back of the head. "My sister does that because she cares.

Cigarettes cause cancer. They pollute the air. You know that?" "Is that why you made all of us swap our cigarette packs for pretzel sticks?" the kid mumbled.

Cade smacked him again. "Obviously. My sister's coming by in a minute, so everybody act normal—" He glanced up. I was already standing in the doorway with my backpack on.

He scrambled off the floor. "Mo. Hey. You're here." He came at me brushing crumbs off his palms, still chewing. "School let out early?" "I skipped." That stopped him. "Well. Fine.

You already know the material anyway." "Couple of junk classes won't keep us out of Columbia." "You hungry? Come on, big brother's buying.

There's a new fried chicken place by the arcade—" The rest of it died in his mouth when he got a look at my face. Then he went off. "Somebody at that school messing with you?

Give me a name. I'll go find him right now.

Son of a bitch, putting hands on Cade Doyle's sister—" I smiled. "Big brother." I kept my voice soft. "My family came looking for me." He went still.

Sun came through the big front windows and cut a stripe down the hallway. It turned his fuzzy bleached hair almost seethrough, a pale gold. Half his face went bright.

The other half stayed dark, and I couldn't read anything in it. It took him a while to get his mouth into something like a smile. "Mo.

What are you even talking about?" I'd known since I was little that Cade and I didn't share any blood. He was six years older. The year he found me, he had just started first grade.

His parents went young. He lived by himself at the edge of Bellhaven and grew up half wild. The man who ran the general store became Cade's guardian on paper.

He kept the county off Cade's back and signed whatever the school put in front of him. In practice, Cade still lived by himself at the edge of Bellhaven and grew up half wild.

So when he found me lying in a patch of weeds, he decided the world had handed him a sister. I screamed because I was starving.

He went door to door around town begging for formula and carried it home to mix. The man who ran the general store finally couldn't take it.

He started picking up a few cans for Cade whenever he drove out to the supermarket past the town line. My belly was full and I still cried.

Cade knocked on every door in Bellhaven until somebody had an answer for him.

The woman who'd raised the most babies in that town sighed down at him. "She wants her mother." "That one you can't give her." He was six years old.

He stood on her front step holding an empty bottle, and he stood there a long, long time. Chapter 2 He chewed on it the whole walk back.

Then he ran inside, gritted his teeth, and pulled his shirt off. He tucked me against his bare chest and held me there, warming me with his own body. "Okay.

Come on." I stopped crying. I hung onto him and slept the whole night through. By morning his chest was a mess of scratches where my nails had dug in.

He winced through putting ointment on them and grinned anyway. "Worked, didn't it." A few years later, we were poor in a way that had no bottom to it.

A couple came in from outside town in a pickup with no plates.

They offered five thousand dollars to take me off his hands. "Girl doesn't even have a birth certificate." "Nobody's ever gonna come looking." They were right about that part.

Nobody ever had.

Cade grabbed the baseball bat from behind the door and ran them half a mile down the road. "Get out!" "I'll starve to death right here before I sell my sister!" "Me and her are together for good.

Trash like you doesn't get to look at her." He was fifteen that year. Already tall enough that the local troublemakers started crossing the street when they saw him coming.

That night he sat on the front step and stared at the moon until the sky went gray. The next day he came to me. "Mo.

How about your big brother takes you to the city for school?" What he didn't say was that once we got to Pittsburgh, he would never sit in a classroom again.

At first he took any work that would wreck his back. Then he learned how the city ran, picked up a few guys, and started doing security for a bar.

I stayed top of my class year after year, and the school handed out real scholarship money for it. I brought the envelope home to him.

He shoved it back at me with a straight face and wouldn't take a cent. "Your brother's got money." "That's yours. School gave it to you for finishing first.

Spend it on whatever you want. You run out, you come to me." "I've got money, Mo. I swear." Senior year, the school held an awards night. I was eighteen.

They asked each winner to bring up the person who raised them and let them say a few words, in front of a couple thousand students and teachers.

Cade walked up there with his bleached hair and a face full of cuts in every stage of healing, and stood at the microphone grinning like an idiot.

Everything that came out of him came out sideways. "Parenting. I didn't do anything, honestly." "This is all Mo. She did every bit of it herself." "Yeah.

I'm her brother." "It's just the two of us." Somebody in the back rows laughed. Then a few more. It went across the room like weather.

I sat up straight in the front row and watched him. He washed his hair with bar soap to save money, so it stuck up in every direction.

From where I sat, the light caught the fine gold hairs along his jaw. He was beautiful. That was the word for it. I couldn't find another one. I swallowed, and I was quiet about it.

Eighteen years, and that was the first time I understood I'd been looking at my brother wrong. The second he finished and bowed, I started the applause.

The whole room came in behind me, loud enough to bury whatever my heart was doing. Back then I really believed it. Just the two of us, for the rest of our lives.

I thought that would be perfect. Until the Ashfords found me. A Rolls sat parked outside that beatup pool hall. People walking past kept turning their heads at it.

Cade and I sat in the back. He turned the pages of the DNA results under the starlight headliner, and his mouth started to shake. "Mo.

You're telling me these people have been talking to you for two weeks?" He looked up at me with those wet dog eyes.

Pitiful. "You didn't tell your brother." "The results weren't back. It might not have been me." I tapped my nails against my palm and let that cover the rest of it.

There was also the part I left out. Before that day, I hadn't finished negotiating with them yet. I closed my eyes and pushed the restlessness back down. Then he asked it. "So, Mo.

You're going to New York with them. Your… family." He couldn't get the word out clean. I turned my head. His fingers had a death grip on those pages.

His brows had pulled together tight. His throat kept working. The hand holding the report was shaking now. His knuckles went white by degrees.

A crease pressed itself into the edge of the paper. A little more pressure and it would tear.

Chapter 3 The red at the corners of his eyes and the white in his lips made him look like something you'd want to pick up off the ground. Big brother. Big brother.

I said it twice inside my own head. Out loud I kept it gentle. "Yes. And I'm taking you with me." That caught him off guard. I let my eyes wind around him. "You promised me.

Remember?" "We stay together. Always." The next night, two more Ashfords came. One of them was supposedly my half brother. Damien Ashford.

He wore a face that looked about halfway like mine. He smiled at me, polite down to the last degree. "Mo.

May I call you that?" I nodded. "The family has holdings out here, so the uncles stayed behind.

I'll take you to dinner with them tonight." "Once the paperwork clears, you can come home to New York with your brother." He'd brought a small white dress with him.

A gift, he said. "Go put it on." He watched me while he said it, and he laughed a little. It had to be expensive.

On me it weighed nothing at all, softer than anything I'd ever had against my skin. Like standing inside a cloud.

But while I was smoothing the hem in the mirror, I thought about the year I turned thirteen. I'd taken first place in the state essay contest.

To celebrate, Cade walked me into the old department store downtown, the biggest one in the city, to buy me a pretty dress.

He had a little money coming in by then, from bar work and from fighting in basements.

He rubbed at his messy hair and swung one arm out wide. "Pick anything you want, Mo!" Neither of us had any idea what that store charged.

The first white dress I pulled off the rack was four hundred and twenty dollars. Cade went digging through every pocket he owned and stacked the bills on the counter.

It came to a hundred and sixty. The sales associate rolled her eyes. "If you can't pay for it, don't come in." "Look at the state of you.

She's had it on, so now nobody's going to want it." "Disgusting." Cade's eyes went red at the rims. His fist came up and stopped an inch from her cheek.

What came out of his mouth was a voice I'd never heard him use before. "Apologize to my sister." The woman went white to the lips. The aisle had filled up behind us by then.

Somebody had already called it in. He never actually touched her, so we gave a statement and walked out. The walk home was soft with moonlight.

Somewhere beside me the breathing turned uneven. I turned my head and found out he was crying. "I'm sorry, Mo." He had to fight to get it out. "This one's on me. You won today.

You were supposed to have a good day…" I reached over and hooked my arm through his, then tipped my head back to look up at him. "But I did have a good day." With you.

Whatever we were doing, wherever we went. Every single time. "Mo. We should go." A voice I didn't know pulled me back out of it.

In the mirror I found Damien leaning against the door frame, taking me in from hem to collar and back down again. "When I bought it, I knew.

My sister was going to look beautiful in this." He offered me his arm like a gentleman, and I took it down the stairs. The Ashfords called it a small family dinner.

I'd meant to bring Cade with me. He wouldn't come. "Got something going at the hall." "There's a fight tonight." "I really don't have the time." "Besides, Mo.

You haven't seen your family your whole life. You two must have a lot to talk about." In the end I didn't push him.

Looking back on it now, that was the first time I ever heard my brother lie to me. It was also the first time I let him get away with it.

Chapter 4 Standing at the car, though, something turned me around. I looked up and down the street. People came and went. Not one face I knew.

Like the stare that had been sitting on my back a second earlier, heavy and half wrecked, had never been there at all. Damien tilted his head. "Something wrong, Mo?

See somebody?" "No." I let go of his arm and got in. There isn't much to say about that dinner. I ate maybe four bites of it. Every Ashford at the table was a stranger to me.

Except the one who ran Ashford Group. Old Mrs. Ashford. My grandmother, they told me.

She got both arms around me and cried until her whole face was wet. "You look exactly like your mother…" I had no idea what to do with that, so I pulled back a little.

She didn't chase it. She only held onto my hand hard for a second. Near the end of the meal she said, "Why wait?

Come back with us tomorrow." "We'll deal with the school paperwork after." "The plane leaves at ten in the morning." She patted the back of my hand. "Seventeen years, sweetheart." I nodded. "All right.

Then I'm bringing my brother. You already agreed to that." The table went quiet. Damien finished a spoonful of soup, set the spoon down, and turned to me without hurrying. "Mo.

This family spent years looking for you. Whatever you ask for, you'll get it." "I only wonder whether you've asked Mr.

Doyle whether he wants to come." "A change like that is hard on a man. He may not do as well somewhere else as he's doing right now." "The family won't stand in your way.

Not on anything." "But this one, I'd ask Cade Doyle first. Before you decide." I thought he was ridiculous. There was no version of this where my brother didn't want to come.

We'd sworn on the moon years ago. Always. Damien got called away halfway through the meal. Before he left, he made sure the driver knew to take me home after.

I climbed our stairwell under the old light that stuttered on every landing, and let myself in. The apartment was dark.

I hit the switch in the living room and found Cade already home. A halffinished cup of noodles sat on the coffee table. The film of oil on top had gone solid. "Mo?" He looked up.

There was a fresh split at the corner of his mouth, and the room had a faint copper smell to it. "That's your dinner?" "Got back late. Didn't feel like cooking.

Just threw something together." He scrubbed a hand through his hair, got up, and headed for the balcony.

I followed him out with the keys still in my fist. "You were fighting again." He made a sound that meant yes and dumped his dirty clothes into the washer.

When he explained, he kept his voice low. "Wasn't looking for it. Guy came into the bar giving one of the girls trouble." Then he pressed his lips together and stopped.

He reached up and started pulling the dry laundry down. Something began going wrong in that silence, and I couldn't put a name to it yet. I squeezed the keys until the teeth bit in.

The sting got me talking. "The Ashfords are taking me to New York tomorrow." "Come with me, big brother." He stood there in the middle of our rented apartment with his head down, not looking at me, folding the same dry clothes over and over.

Moonlight came through the window and laid a clean line across the floor between us. "That's good." Chapter 5 "Go back with them," he said. "That's your family. Me? I'm fine here.

I'll stay." Something went off inside my chest and took everything with it. My mouth opened and closed.

The voice that came out of me had been scraped up from somewhere very deep and very dry. "What are you saying? You forgot?

You said you'd be my brother my whole life—" He folded the last dress and cut me off without letting his face move. "Mo Doyle. I was never your brother anyway." "Go to New York.

Don't come looking for me again." "What did you say