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midnight black, and with heavy eyeliner around his eyes, with the remains of black fingernail polish peeling from his chewed fingernails, the look accentuated his pale complexion and his blue eyes.
    Both of which he’d gotten from his father, an Air Force officer their mother had hooked up with briefly after Eden, Dan, and their older sister Sandy’s father, Daniel Gillman the second, had moved out for good.
    Because they were only separated but not divorced, and because the Air Force captain was both married and a total son of a bitch, when Eden’s mother, Ivette, got pregnant and Ben was born, she put Daniel Gillman the second’s name down on the birth certificate, in the slot that said
father
.
    Which had led to a lot of shouting and name-calling when their divorce finally went through, and paying child support became mandatory.
    But Ivette had tried to pretend that then-five-year-old Ben was the result of a night she and Daniel had spent together when he’d returned to Fort Bragg, and she’d gone up to see him in Fayetteville. Daniel had been pretty drunk at the time—it was no wonder he didn’t remember any of it.
    Of course he didn’t remember it, because it hadn’t happened.
    But because Ivette was not only a loser, but was also drawn to men who were losers as well, and because Eden’s father was a son of a bitch, too, he didn’t think about the damage that his words might do to a child when he used Ben with his blue eyes and red hair as Exhibit A. He didn’t need a paternity test, he’d shouted, because there was no way a child this ugly, scrawny, and fair-complexioned could possibly be his.
    It had been Ben’s first meeting with his estranged “dad,” and all of his fantasy expectations had been cruelly dashed.
    As he grew, he continued to see himself only as ugly. Try as she might, Eden hadn’t been able to change his mind about that. Because, bottom line, he wanted the same brown eyes and thick, dark hair that she and Danny and Sandy all had. He wanted to be a full, not a faux Gillman.
    Eden stared at Ben now, dumbstruck. As she forced herself to greet and embrace this exotic stranger that her little brother had become, she wondered if he realized just how handsome—movie-star worthy, in fact—he was going to be in a few more years, when he filled out.
    “Thank you for coming to Vegas,” he said as he hugged her in return. “I would’ve just left home, the way you did, but …”
    “Your diabetes,” Eden said. He’d eventually run out of insulin.
    She felt him nod. “I’d have to come back home. Or die.”
    His voice was different, too—it was now deeper than hers. It had always pissed him off, the way he’d often been called “ma’am” when he’d answered the phone.
    Eden’s voice had always been unusually low and husky, even when she was a child, and she’d turned it into a game—a contest—so that Ben would stop feeling bad. She would pitch her voice even lower to try to get the people who called to address her as “sir.” Ben, in turn, had to
try
to get people to call him “ma’am,” and whoever scored the most number of hits during the week got to choose the TV shows they’d watch on Saturday mornings, when their mother was sleeping late with whichever husband or boyfriend was currently sharing her bed.
    Ben always won, but it didn’t matter. Eden had always let her little brother choose anyway.
    But those days were long gone. No one would mistake Ben for a “ma’am” ever again. Unless, of course, he threw away the Goth look and dressed in drag. That could work. He was going to be
that
pretty.
    “How are you?” he asked as he hugged her. “Eedie, I’m so sorry about the baby.”
    Eden closed her eyes, refusing to go back there, but knowing it didn’t matter. Whether she focused on it or not, for the rest of her life, she was going to walk around with an empty space in her heart. “Yeah, that sucked. Let’s not talk about it.”
    “I didn’t want to not