But I couldn’t say anything. Who was I to tell a woman to forget something like that? She had been cheated on. She deserved to be mad, but I had to watch that hate eat at her for almost two decades. There was no justice in her pain. There was just loneliness.

But deep in the pit of my fucking heart, I just wished she would let go, so I could too.

So yeah. My father, he fucking ruined my mom. And maybe if she was stronger, she could have moved on. Maybe if I was a better son, I could have helped her.

I’d driven past Dalton, and I was ambushed with this hot rage. Because nobody knew the real me at Maybelwood. They saw Ryke fucking Meadows, an all-American track star, an honor student, a kid who got detention for cursing almost every other day.

Loren had both my parents on paper.

He had the last name.

He had the billion-dollar legacy.

I didn’t even know how much they told him—whether he knew about me or not. I didn’t fixate on that. I couldn’t get over the fact that all this time, he stole them from me. I had nothing but the yelling and screaming of a complicated divorce. I was the real fucking child of Jonathan and Sara Hale.

So why the fuck did I have to pretend to be the bastard? Why was Loren given the life that I was meant to live?

On the field, I had chugged a bottle of whiskey. I was numb to the burn. I had broken the bottle over the goal post, hoping Loren was a soccer player, hoping it’d cut up his fucking feet, and every time he felt pain, it’d be my doing.

And then the next morning, I woke up after nearly killing myself and anyone in the wake of my swerving car, drinking too fucking much. I was cold inside. Just fucking dead. I didn’t want to be like that. I made a promise to myself. My father wasn’t going to destroy me, and neither was my half-brother. Or my mother. I was going to get my shit together.

I’d run.

I’d go to college.

And I’d find my peace.

Fuck. Them. All.

My dad relaxed. “A mailbox isn’t a big deal. Your brother has done worse things.” He shook his head at the mental images. And then his eyes flickered up to me, and I knew the question was about to come. “Do you want to meet him?”

I opened my mouth, but he cut me off.

“Before you say no, hear me out. He’s had it much different than you—”

“I’m fucking over it.” I didn’t want to waste my energy on Loren anymore. I was done.

“It’s not easy growing up with the Hale name. Our money comes from baby products. He endures a lot of teasing—”

“I don’t give a shit,” I sneered. We were both living a lie, but mine was worse. “I was never allowed to tell people who you were. Did he have to do that? Mom used to say that people would treat me differently if they knew my dad was a billion-dollar CEO, but really, you both were trying to fucking hide me.” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. For fuck’s sake, she had to keep Hale as her surname, a stipulation in the divorce settlement, while I remained a Meadows.

“Not exactly,” he said. “We were trying to cover the fact that Loren wasn’t Sara’s child. She was only pregnant once. We couldn’t justify both of you without ruining my reputation.”

That was why my mom had to keep her mouth shut about the cheating, to protect Jonathan. And every day she had to help this soulless prick, it fucking ate her up again. But she did it for the money. I didn’t think any amount of cash was worth the fucking pain of these lies.

Everything was to save face.

“Why choose him?” I asked. “Why isn’t Loren the one being hidden?” You love him more.

His face remained blank, all the hard edges not revealing anything to me. He wore a dapper suit that made him look as expensive as he was. “It’s just how things worked out. It was easier for you to take your mother’s maiden name. Loren only had one option. And that was me.”

I ground my teeth. “You know, I just tell all my friends that my dad died. Sometimes, I even find clever ways to kill you off. Oh yeah, my dad, he drowned on a fucking boat accident; perished in his golden fucking yacht while he was shitting on the toilet.”

He became a ghost or demon I’d meet on Mondays. Nothing more.

He licked his lips and swished his scotch, not meeting my gaze. He almost laughed. He found that fucking funny. “Listen, Jonathan,” he said.

“It’s Ryke,” I shot back. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you that?” I didn’t want his name any more than I wanted his genes. I planned to use my middle name forever.

He rolled his eyes again and then sighed. “Loren isn’t like you. He’s not good at sports. I don’t think he’s ever aced a test in his life. He’s wasting his potential by going to parties. If you’d meet him, you could help—”

“No,” I forced. I put my forearms on the table and leaned close. “I don’t want anything to do with your son. So stop fucking asking.”

He took out his wallet and passed me a picture, one he’d shown me a couple times before. Loren was sitting on the stairs of our father’s mansion, where he grew up. I always looked for similarities in our features and felt sickened by them.

We had the same eye color, only his were more amber than my brown. My face was harder cut, but our builds were more alike, lean not bulky. He wore a navy blue tie and a white button-down, the Dalton Academy uniform. He wasn’t staring at the camera, but his jaw was so sharp, unlike anything I’d seen before. He looked like a fucking douchebag, like he’d much rather be popping open beers with his buddies than sitting there.

“He’s your brother—”

I slid the picture back to him. “He’s no one to me.”

Jonathan downed the second glass of scotch, pocketing the photo. And he grumbled under his breath about my “bitch” of a mother. She never wanted me to meet Loren, just the same way that she refused to come into contact with him. As far as I knew, Loren thought Sara was his mom like the rest of the world. Or maybe someone finally told him the truth. That he’s the fucking bastard.

I wouldn’t know.

And frankly, I didn’t fucking care.

What difference would it have made anyway?

< 1 >

NINE YEARS LATER

RYKE MEADOWS

I run. Not away from anything. I have a fucking destination: the end of a long suburban street lined with four colonial houses and acres of dewy grass. It’s as secluded as it can be. Six in the morning. The sky is barely light enough to see my feet pound the asphalt.

I fucking love early mornings.

I love watching the sun rise more than watching it set.

I keep running. My breathing steadies in a trained pattern. Thanks to a collegiate track scholarship, and thanks to climbing rocks—a sport that I sincerely fucking crave—I don’t have to think about inhaling and exhaling. I just do. I just focus on the end of the street, and I go after it. I don’t fucking slow down. I don’t stop. I see what I have to do, and I fucking make it happen.

I hear my brother’s shoes hit the cement behind me, his legs pumping as quickly as mine. He tries to keep up with my pace. He’s not running towards shit. My brother—he’s always running away. I listen to the heaviness of his soles, and I want to fucking grab his wrist and pull him ahead of me. I want him to be unburdened and light, to feel that runner’s high.

But he’s weighed down by too much to reach anything good. I don’t slow to let him catch me. I want him to push himself as far as he can go. I know he can get here.

He just has to fucking try.

One minute later, we reach the end of the street that we were shooting for, next to an oak tree. Lo breathes heavily, not in exhaustion, more like anger. His nose flares, and his cheekbones cut brutally sharp. I remember meeting him for the very first time.

It was about three years ago.

And he looked at me with those same pissed off amber-colored eyes, and that same, I fucking hate the world expression. He was twenty-one back then. Our relationship balances somewhere between rocky and stable, but it was never meant to be perfect.

“You can’t go easy on me just once?” Lo asks, pushing the longer strands of his light brown hair off his forehead. The sides are trimmed short.

“If I slowed down, we would have been walking.”

Lo rolls his eyes and scowls. He’s been in a bad place for a few months, and this run was supposed to release some of the tension. But it’s not helping.

I see the tightness in his chest, the way he can still barely fucking breathe.

He squats and rubs his eyes.

“What do you need?” I ask him seriously.

“A fucking glass of whiskey. One ice cube. Think you can do that for me, big bro?”

I glare. I hate the way he calls me bro. It’s with fucking scorn. I can count on my hand the amount of times he’s called me “brother” with affection or admiration. But he usually acts like I don’t deserve the title yet.

Maybe I don’t.

I knew about Loren Hale for practically all my life, and I didn’t even say hi. I think back often to when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and my father asked every fucking week: “Do you want to meet your brother?”

I rejected the offer every single time.

When I was in college, I came to terms with the fact that I would never know him. I thought I was at peace. I stopped hating Loren Hale for just existing. I stopped listening to my mother condemn a kid that had no say in being born. I slowly stopped talking to my father, losing contact because I didn’t need him.