Page 212 of Broken Brothers

“I’m not sure how to feel myself,” she said. “This is a strange day.”

A question crossed my mind that felt almost disturbing to ask, definitely disturbing to even consider. But the more I thought about how Edwin and Melanie had interacted, the more I considered what their relationship was like, the more I couldn’t help but wonder…

“Did you ever love him, Mom?”

The fact that there was a long silence after the question was painful. It wasn’t painful for me, but I felt so bad for Melanie. Even if the answer to my question was yes, that she was taking so long to answer told me that she had to go way back in time to find a point when she liked him.

“I don’t know, Chance,” she said quietly.

That might be the saddest part in all of this. For all of the money in the world, for all of the business accomplishments, the story of Edwin will be a complete lack of love.

“He charmed me when we first met, but we were so young,” she said. “I thought I loved him. But I was too young to know what love was. By the time I figured it out, we were already married…”

Her voice trailed off. I wrapped my arm around her, to which she smiled, cooed, and rubbed my back.

“I’m quite alright, dear,” she said. “It’s sad that I spent so long with a man I currently don’t love, but there’s no going back to that now. I can only focus on the time that I have now and move forward.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re taking it rather well.”

Mom shrugged.

“My heart aches for both of you,” she said, nodding toward Morgan in the room. “I know this doesn’t mean as much to you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you.”

“You got—”

“Just let me do it as a Mom,” she said reassuringly.

I smiled and did so, wrapping my arm around her.

“He was a man who never knew what really mattered,” Mom said. “His last few days were spent with Morgan sporadically checking on him. No one else really cared, though. When all you do is have interest in money, you attract the kind of people who are only interested in money. And those kind of people will gladly get rid of you if it means they have an opportunity to get more money. Chance… you two are so young and have so many opportunities ahead of you. Just remember what you chase, you attract.”

I didn’t think I had heard the moral stated so well, but it was definitely something I’d been thinking of the previous couple of weeks.

Standing there, seeing my mother happy to be free from a loveless marriage and Edwin Hunt gone, I swore I would not make the same mistake as him. I had a chance to have something that, at best, he had only had for a fleetingly short period of time. I had a chance to have love with Layla.

I didn’t need to see much else to wait on. I didn’t need to know anything else.

Well, there was one thing I needed to wait on, but it had nothing to do with her. For the sake of Morgan and my mother,I couldn’t focus on anything but those two until the funeral had concluded. Even if my relationship with Edwin could best be described as “rough,” my relationship with Morgan and Mom was “loving.”

I would get to Layla, but life had thrown one more curveball at me. If Layla was meant to be, she would understand.

85

When I left the hospital, I found it difficult to describe how I felt.

I didn’t feel selfishly sad or sorrowful, but the levels of empathy I had for Morgan were naturally dragging my mood down. If I detached myself from Morgan and just focused on what I felt for Edwin, that was easy—there was nothing. But I had an obligation as his brother to be there for him.

The sorrow that weighed on me sent my mind to some weird places that weren’t necessarily dark or sad, but nevertheless had me wondering how things had been and could have been. The biggest thing I kept flashing back to was wondering what my life would have been like if I had stayed with my biological parents—if I had had a father worth having.

There was no reason to consider the hypothetical of if Edwin had been a better father. I’d had two decades of experience to know not only was that fruitless, there was never a reason to expect it to have ever changed. But my father… Parker Givens… what kind of a man was he? What kind of a woman was my actual mother, Bethany Givens?

I knew their names, but I didn’t know their faces. I had deliberately stayed far away and refused anything that Mom didn’t force me to hear. But now?

I sure was awfully curious.

A big part of it was me opening up to the idea that life was not one series of abandonments after another. Layla and Morgan had shown that to me in the past couple of weeks, but that was overt; it was obvious that they had not abandoned me. But was it possible that my parents choosing to give me up for adoption was not abandonment, but simply the best choice? I had almost certainly wound up in better economic conditions, and it was hard to have a brother and mother I was closer to than the ones I had now.

At the very least, I was starting to realize that “abandonment” was no longer the default for how my relationships would go.