Page 6 of Broken Brothers

“I told her I was adopted just now,” I huffed, glaring out over the hill that hid her house from view on their property. “She can’t date a poor guy you know, it’s just ‘not done.’ Her father would never allow her to date me. Doesn’t matter that I’m considered family. Dating me would probably be grounds for being sent away… or worse.”

I had no idea if that was true, but the words seeped in sarcasm and bitterness did the trick. Hearing the words from her was just like an affirmation of all of the things he knew growing up, thrown back in his face and left there to fester.

Except she hadn’t just thrown them. She had taken them, shaped them into a knife, let me look at it, and then walked around and stabbed me in the back.

“You know what’s sad? Well, you might not think this. But… When she thought I was a Hunt things were good…”

The minute that she found out otherwise, the minute that she found out who I really was…

And I knew there was no escaping my current fate, my current status, and my current family.

In some ways, I loved them. They helped me and gave me what they needed.

But in other ways, I hated being with them.

I had to live with them, learn all of their rules and their intrigues, but I was never going to be good enough. My future,sincerely, was that of the simple son adopted to be built into what looked like a manservant for their only real son. That was my place, the place that Mr. Edwin Hunt had appointed me before even meeting me.

It just wasn’t the role that I had actually taken on, something that had more to do with Morgan and my mother than it did with Mr. Hunt’s planning—God knows Mr. Hunt had no shame in playing up the family dynamics. Morgan didn’t want me as a manservant, he wanted him as a friend and a brother, which, I guess, a friend and a brother I was, good enough in Morgan’s eyes… but no one else’s.

I would always be on the outside looking in, like the kids outside those pastry shops I’d grown up passing with the Hunt’s who could not afford the luxury desserts, all of those goods lined on the counter that they would never get to touch. It was the same hollow, hungry feeling that choked up the back of my throat and lay leaden in my stomach. I may be named Chance Hunt, but I sure as hell didn’t feel like a Hunt right now—or ever, for that matter.

“You won’t always be poor, Chance,” Morgan finally cut in, drawing my gaze back.

The funny thing was, when I got older, I always wondered if Morgan was the one thing I would end up feeling the most hate about being adopted by the Hunt’s… and was the one thing that actually made any of the bitter yearning bearable. The two of us had bonded so far past what Mr. Hunt had intended for us to do, our lives intertwining until they were past the point of being separated. My “father” might be that only in the legal sense, but Morgan was truly my brother.

“You have to say that,” I replied lightly, trying to let his friend off of the hook. “Since I’m destined to grow up and be your damned butler. At least I won’t be your maid.”

I knew I was just fuming at this point, but what else could I do?

“I couldn’t do that, could you imagine how awkward you being my butler would be?” Morgan retorted.

We both laughed, and the genuineness of my brother briefly relieved the frustration I felt.

“Having you as my brother will be bad enough! Besides, you’re too nosy to ever be a successful butler.”

The jokes were nice. They felt good, at least in the way that a brief drop of a roller coaster felt good.

But like the nauseous feeling following a roller coaster too close to a meal, once the laughter subsided, the disgust and anger at what had just happened and my current family situation came roaring back. I couldn’t just drop it, no matter how much I wished I could. Alfred, I wanted to joke, had been a successful butler to Bruce Wayne and he’d been plenty nosy. It would have kept in the theme of our joking, but I just didn’t want to joke. What was the damn point?

Sarah was gone. I wasn’t a true Hunt. Nothing else mattered.

“I just want to prove myself.”

This wasn’t something that the two of us had ever discussed previously, and my eyes went anywhere but on my brother. Confessions to Sarah were hard enough—if Morgan mocked me for this, I don’t know that I’d ever show my face in society again.

“I’m not you Morgan, I’m not even like you. I don’t have any real family to fall back on, much less a family name or family money. I want to make something of myself, I want to have my own money to fall back on, my own money to leave mykids.”

If I ever get to have them…

I knew that I probably should have left it alone. These were things that I knew not a lot of kids his age even thought about, much less wanted to talk about. Especially in the circles Morgan and I ran in.

But when you grow up in the environment I did with the disadvantages I did, you grew up awfully quickly.

“I don’t want to be a butler.”

I was trying to soften it again, pull back from that depressive spiral that I was falling into. We didn’t have time for it.

Or, rather, I didn’t think that Morgan really wanted to be talking about any of this, and why would he? It wasn’t that I thought that Morgan wouldn’t talk to me about it, it wasn’t even that I thought that Morgan would have a problem with doing so.