LITMIR.BIZ

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night about four hundred thousand times in the ambulance.”

      “Have I?” his eyebrows shot up. “I don’t get brood—”

      She cut him off with a cluck of her tongue. “Don’t even bother. You’re just lucky I took pity on you and made sweet love to you all afternoon to keep your mind off your troubles.” She sat back with a satisfied grin, all the while rat-a-tat-tatting her I-know-I’m-right fingers along the edge of the wooden tabletop.

      “First of all, young lady, I think you’ll find it was me who made the first move.” Santiago drew himself up to what he hoped was his most impressive height.

      “First of all nothing.” Saoirse shook her head with a quick no-you-don’t finger wag that would’ve sent any child running to the naughty corner of their own volition.

      Damn. It was a crying shame this woman wouldn’t be a mother. Any offspring of hers would be about as well behaved as they came, too terrified to contest the finger wag.

      “There’s a reason I haven’t been to see them yet.” Santi felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. Feeble, he knew. But it was his truth and he was going to own it. He wanted to be ready to see them.

      “In my book? The best time to do something like this is when you’re least prepared. That way you’re expecting very little...” Saoirse collapsed her spine into a curve then sprang back upright “...and your bounce-back factor will be high.”

      “My bounce-back factor?”

      “Yes. You’ll be needing that if things don’t go well.”

      “So you’re already banking on failure?” He bristled.

      She snorted. “Santiago Valentino, I’ve never heard such balderdash in all my days. You are the strongest, most capable, failure-free zone of a human I’ve ever had the honor to work with.”

      He shook his head. Now wasn’t the time for basking in undeserved compliments. “It’s not that simple.”

      “You are, of course, completely free to share and explain why trotting down the road and telling your brothers you’re back in town is so difficult, but in my culture...” she paused for effect, the hint of a twinkle in her eyes “...we harbor our secrets close to our chests unless the whole village knows about it anyway, in which case there’s not much point in discussing what’s already a done deal. The point being, I fled for something everyone knew about. There was no need to spell it all out for folk. Public humiliation does that to a girl, but I’m getting the feeling you’re the only one who knows why you left.”

      “I left a note.”

      “Someone’s sounding a bit defensive.” She snorted.

      “I could have just left! No note—nothing.”

      “Really? Is that what you could have done?” Saoirse looked at him as if he’d just told the biggest honking lie of the lot. But she hadn’t known him then. Rebel without a cause didn’t even begin to cover it. The motorcycle was all that remained of his bad-boy image he’d fine-tuned to teenage perfection.

      “You don’t know what kind of man—kid—I was back then.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I wasn’t a big fan of who I was becoming, this restless, confused mess.”

      “Not so much of a mess you didn’t recognize what was happening. And not so much of a mess you didn’t man up and do something about it. Besides,” she added with a grin, “you did leave a note.”

      “It wasn’t a back-in-five sort of job!” He snapped. “Sorry, I just—”

      “Are we feeling a bit touchy because someone is actually going to go and do this thing?”

      “Very.”

      Jangling nerves were getting the better of him and that’s not how he wanted this to go. He’d joined the military to gain better control over himself—his emotions, his goals, his future. And here he was, messing it all up again.

      Maybe that was the irony. When he’d been on duty in the world’s cruelest war zones, the main lesson he’d come away with? You couldn’t control life—you could only control how you responded to it. He should have had a reminder tattooed on his forearm: Be the man you know you can be.

      “Tell me about the note,” Saoirse said softly.

      “It was...it was sort of like a guide to life from fifteen to eighteen. My area of expertise.” He appreciated Saoirse’s laugh. To describe it now sounded so juvenile, but that’s what he had been. Countless miles from adulthood.

      “And what was all this wise advice you were offering your brother?”

      “It was reams—well, not exactly reams but it was vital information for a thirteen-year-old. The coolest place to hang out. Which locker bay to get assigned when he was a senior in high school, which streets to steer clear of because of the gangs, although he pretty much knew that already. Never to take Mr. Prunte’s science class because the man was a much better baseball coach than he was science teacher.” He watched as Saoirse’s eyes grew wider and wider. “I wasn’t going to leave Alejandro completely hanging.”

      “What did you do? Tuck it under his pillow?”

      Her words, meant to be jokey, struck him like daggers. Reminders that he had been a coward. Leaving home only to try and prove his mettle on an anonymous battlefield where failure wouldn’t feel so personal. But it had. Every life lost had sucked his soul a little bit drier, leaving it little more than an arid wasteland. And now he was supposed to just wander over to the bodega with a sack of sandwiches and make everything all right again?

      A surge of frustration washed through him.

      “What was I supposed to do, Murph? There’s no guide for kids whose parents are shot right in front of them. My kid brother almost died. And all he had was me—the poor second to my older brothers who did the best they could in the circumstances. Looking after us, making good on their full-ride scholarships to medical school while keeping the family business running as well. They don’t write those kind of guides, mija. I did the best I could.”

      Saoirse stared at him slack-jawed.

      “That may have come out a bit more aggressively than I’d intended.” It didn’t sound like an apology. But it was one. The best he could do, all things considered.

      She shook her head, her fingers steepling in front of her lips. Whether it was to keep words in or out he couldn’t tell.

      Her fingers parted.

      “So, what you’re really saying is that your brothers are the only ones in the world who would understand?”

      He nodded. Maybe it was a simpleton’s view, but that’s what his heart was telling him. Saoirse could offer compassion and that, of course, was invaluable...but his brothers had understanding. They’d lived through what he’d lived through and for the first few years after their parents had died the shared experience had been an insoluble glue.

      “Well, then...” she nodded at the huge paper bag the waitress was carrying in their direction “...I guess you’d better get going.”

      * * *

      He heard them before he saw them. The unmistakable laughter. The playful mocking. A sharp chiding for a near miss with a catering-sized can of jalapenos, chased up by a call to throw an extra case of pinto beans to “the ugly one.”

      Egalitarian brother love.

      In the Valentino household? They were all “the ugly one.”

      “Hé!” he called out a few yards away from the back storeroom where they kept their stock.

      The banter continued unabated. They obviously hadn’t heard him.

      Santi repeated the call, too loudly this time, and all the hustle and bustle of stocktaking clattered to an abrupt halt.

      His

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