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three hundred yards—and worsted weight. He grabbed a pair of twenty-inch circular needles and started to cast on blindly, thinking that everyone needed a gaiter this time of year.
    “I like that colorway,” Ari said. “One of yours?”
    Aiden nodded. “Jeremy came up with it. Said they were my colors—it’s the only colorway he’s ever created.”
    Ari made a little sound—helpless and trying so hard not to be broken. “I don’t know if I’ve ever thought of you that dark,” she said quietly. “But you must be.”
    “He knew,” Aiden said, remembering that moment. Jeremy looking at the sky, seeing the darkness of the night as it gave way to the promise of an autumn dawn. “He’s always known I’ve got that darkness in me.”
    Ari placed a gentle hand on his arm, and he stopped casting on for a moment and squeezed her hand.
    “So he’s probably not surprised at what you did,” she said, and he wondered, what was it about women that they knew the size and shape of the splinter as it worked its way to your heart.
    “No,” he said softly. “But we haven’t had a chance to talk about it.”
    “Well, no.”
    He looked up and saw that she was smiling at him, and he finished casting on quietly, working the slingshot cast-on without conscious thought until there was no yarn on the long tail.
    “I’m not going to say anything,” he muttered after a few minutes.
    “Whyever not?”
    Aiden glared at her, surprised. “Because it’s not something a man talks about!”
    Ari snorted. “Oh the hell it’s not. Jesus, kid—if I killed a man, protected my family like that, I’d be all posturing, right? ‘Look at me, uh-huh, I’m a bitch, uh-huh, don’t fuck with my family, oh no you don’t!’”
    Without warning, Aiden chuckled. “You’d do it, too!”
    “I would take out an ad ,” she vowed solemnly. “So what about you?”
    “I’m the baby,” he confessed.
    “Not to Jeremy.”
    That earned her a quick grin. “No. Not to Jeremy.”
    “You’re the older one with Jeremy, I don’t care what his forged birth certificate says.”
    Aiden had started to look for the real thing, but in order to find it, he’d have to dig into Jeremy’s past a little too deeply. Jeremy’s wounds were healed—reopening them when he was happy? That was just cruel.
    “Yes,” he agreed, perfectly content with this. “He needs me.” Then, the real pain festering inside: “I let him down.”
    Her strong, skinny fingers clenched on his wrist with enough force to bruise.
    “You know that’s a lie,” she said, and in that moment, he felt like he’d walked through another grown-up door, like drinking or deciding what was worth killing for. “You’re one of the people on the short list who has never let him down.”
    “But I want someone to blame,” he said rawly. “Someone who’s not Jeremy or Stanley”—who hadn’t asked for it either—“or Gia—Johnny or Craw or you—” His voice grew squirrely then, running from one octave to another, finally cracking right open in the middle. Boy? Boy? Where are you, boy?
    He wiped his eyes for the first time since his mother had comforted him in his kitchen, and was not surprised when Ariadne snuck her thin arm behind his shoulders.
    “He keeps calling for me like I’m not going to come,” he said at last, and Ari kissed his shoulder.
    “That’s going to be harder to fix than anything,” she told him, and God, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought of before, but oh damn , it was so good to hear someone else say it, someone else admit that Jeremy would need more than stitches and bed rest to be better.
    His breathing grew harsh and loud in the room as they waited, but his hands kept moving. A gaiter, like a scarf, but something that would surround Jeremy, something that would keep him warm and protected, front, back, or on top. That was what he’d try to make for Jeremy—although the color bothered him.
    He grunted quizzically, and Ari stopped humming