Page 103 of Broken Brothers

When I got to my apartment, the first thing I wondered was if anyone would have broken in. Stupid, perhaps, but not that stupid. Nope, the door opened completely normally and without any problems.

But that’s where the normalcy ended.

On my couch, Morgan laid passed out in what could only be described as a drunken slumber. He looked like he had fallen asleep with his mouth open, drool falling out. He snored loudly. His legs half-drooped off of the couch. And a bottle of half-finished gin sat on the coffee table, along with Morgan’s phone and some half-eaten Chinese.

“Fucking a, Morgan,” I mumbled to myself, even though I had sympathy for his current situation. “What the hell happened last night?”

As if answering my question, Morgan’s phone lit up with a text from a girl named Rachel. I couldn’t pin if she was one of the girls that had come to the hotel in my blackout, but I could tell from her words—“Get help, Morgan”—that if she was, she probably didn’t have much interest in pursuing a second round with me or the true Hunt in the family.

Though it felt like a slight invasion of privacy, given my concern for Morgan, I reached down and looked at his phone. He had several notifications, most of them texts from girls and missed calls from phone numbers I didn’t recognize. Well, I didn’t know specifically who they were from, but I had a feeling I knew where they came from.

And that’s when something began to dawn on me.

Edwin Hunt might have hated me most, but it was obvious who had cracked under the pressure the most in the previous couple of months. It was Morgan. Morgan was the one Edwin saw slowly losing his mind every day, slowly cracking under the weight of expectations, slowly starting to become overburdened by the work laid upon him.

Edwin also knew that Morgan and I were attached at the hip as far as our business went. If one of us left, the other would have no choice. I would just tell him to fuck off, but Morgan actually had to live with the fact that that was his father.

My plans for striking back at Edwin, my plans for ignoring him, my plans for outlasting him suddenly seemed awfully dependent upon the actions of my brother. Once again, I was back to looking up to Morgan as someone who couldn’t possibly realize the implications of his actions and words.The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“Oh, fuck.”

Well, he’s alive, if I had any doubts before.

I sat on the chair across from him as he slowly awoke. It was not lost on me how similar this incident was to a few weeks back,except now I was sitting across from Morgan… and Morgan didn’t have a pile of cash… and Morgan didn’t have a hot girl in bed next to him.

So, in short, I had the setting correct but the details so thoroughly missing that what I had thought was a mirror image was really just a mirage in my mind to make me feel like I might have swapped power dynamics when all I had done was create a false illusion.

“You’re back,” he said, his voice so scratchy I feared the mere vibrations of his vocal chords would tear at his throat.

“I had a relaxing evening,” I said, careful still not to reveal the true nature of my relationship with Claire. “Unfortunately, it does not look like the same could be said for you.”

“Fucking tell me about it,” Morgan said. He sounded like he had more to say, but he just put his arm over his head, steadying his breathing, presumably trying to avoid throwing up. For what felt like several long minutes, he simply lay in that position. I was reduced to scrolling through my phone to kill the time as Morgan recovered.

I almost got up and started cooking breakfast when Morgan stood up without warning, headed for the bathroom, and proceeded to puke his guts out.Been there, done that,I thought with some sympathy as I put aside some bacon in case he wanted to come back to it.

Morgan slowly staggered his way back to the kitchen as I started to put the bacon on the pan. The sizzling soon emerged, but it did little to get over the sound of Morgan writhing in pain from the self-induced hangover.

“I drank way too much, Chance,” he said.

I just laughed as I would when we said the same thing in college.

“I’m serious.”

There was no laughter anymore. Not with the tone of voice he spoke with. Not with the lack of faux pleading we would make after a night out in New York as juniors or seniors at Columbia.

“I let what’s going on get to me, and it’s getting to me bad,” he said, rising out of the couch.

He sat there for several seconds, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress, his eyes downcast, his breathing slow. Behind me, the bacon’s scent wafted into my nose, but for perhaps the only time in my life, I ignored it. I could have let that bacon go all day for how much Morgan had my attention.

“I’m worried I’m losing my father,” Morgan said. “I know he’s being a tyrannical asshole right now. But I can’t pretend that losing him is something I can so easily dismiss.”

And with that, my worst fears were confirmed. I could toss Edwin Hunt to the side because I had never had a strong relationship with the man. Losing Edwin Hunt mattered as much to me as losing my favorite pen—it might have sucked to have misplaced, but I would find it soon enough.

But Morgan didn’t know him as Edwin or Mr. Hunt. He knew him as dad.

I never knew my biological father, so I couldn’t pretend that I understood what it meant to have such a strong bond that you would ignore harassment and things bordering on illegal. But I knew from seeing other people and seeing how much Mrs. Hunt stressed over matters that it was a far more common thing that anything I had ever experienced.

But all the same, that could not change anything about the current path we were on. There was just no choice in the matter—we either won, we lost, or we quit and gave in to Edwin, but the latter two options produced the same outcome for me.