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un-tethered. He did yoga too, but it wasn’t enough. After making a smoothie out of an assortment of vegetables and fruit, using the blender he brought from home since Evan didn’t appear to have any sort of useful kitchen appliances, Brennan strolled through the small house, getting a feel for the place.
    There were a couple of messages on his phone when he woke up—from Tommy and Charlie. He hadn’t wanted to listen to either of them. Tommy, his ex, was the past. It was over, and Brennan appreciated that Tommy still cared enough to check on him, but he couldn’t go backward anymore. He needed to move on. And Charlie....
    Brennan sighed, thinking of his biological father, the mastermind behind the current state of affairs. Charlie had orchestrated the move, wanting to bring his sons together at last. He had asked Brennan to move in with Evan, offering Brennan the chance to finally get to know his twin and have a place to live at the same time without having to worry about Charlie being there to butt in very often. It was a tempting offer, and one Brennan couldn’t refuse. The opportunity to get to know Evan seemed priceless, but Brennan still resented the hell out of Charlie. Charlie was a stranger. He was the guy who never bothered to visit or call for Brennan’s entire life. His meager attempts at kindness were too little, too late.
    Sometimes the sheer, sudden absence of responsibility Brennan now enjoyed raised his spirits. The possibilities seemed endless after having assumed the role of caretaker at such a young age. Now he was free of all of that, but what was he left with? Not much, it seemed. The pain drew him down. His heart ached with such loss and grief that it more than overwhelmed him most of the time. All Brennan wanted was to see his mom once more, and it was never going to happen. She was really gone. He told himself she was in a better place, that she wasn’t in pain anymore—no more chemo, no more doctors or hospice. She was free. But he was only eighteen after all, and being on his own,
really
on his own, was a reality so suffocating, Brennan didn’t know how to claw his way out.
    The bedroom was tempting. He could just go back in there and keep on crying and feeling sorry for himself. It would be so easy. Instead, he wandered into Evan’s room and sat on the bed.
    The room was sparse. Besides some battered concert posters and postcards tacked to the wall, there wasn’t much in the way of decoration. A few framed four by six photos lined the one shelf—pictures of Evan as a child, hunting with his dad. Or, rather,
their
dad.
    Brennan lay down with his head on the pillow, curling up and trying to imagine growing up there, how it would have changed who he was to be raised by a father rather than a mother. It was too hard to manage. He couldn’t make the mental leap. He’d never had a father, so he couldn’t begin to imagine what it would have been like. Then, he realized, not for the first time, that Evan never even got to meet their mother, and ached for Evan; he never got to know her, the angel of Brennan’s life.
    A tear slipped down his cheek and he angrily wiped it away. Staring at one of the faded, glossy photos of father and son, Brennan asked the empty room, “Why’d you do it? How could you do this to us? We should have been a
family
instead of torn in half.”
    Before he got to Whippoorwill, he thought it was no question that he’d had the rougher deal, having to nurse Maggie on her deathbed, but after seeing Evan, Brennan realized maybe it wasn’t true. Alone in this dark, empty house, with such shadowy emptiness hiding behind his eyes, Evan struck Brennan as a wounded soul from the moment they were face-to-face at last. And Evan seemed like a stranger. Expecting something from the meeting—recognition, revelation—there had been nothing, only fascination and a sad sense that there was going to be very little the twins would have in common with each other. Evan was a man’s