I let them laugh and share the memory, a small ordinary thing that felt like family. These moments matter as much as the painful ones. Sometimes more because they show people what they’re actually fighting for.
“So, how long were things good?”
“Three years,” they say in unison, and glance at one another from the corners of their eyes.
“How did it all work then?”
“Ripley would have us over for dinner sometimes. He’d come to my games when he could,” Decker says.
Foster makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. His gaze drifts to the window.
“What is it?” My head tilts.
He shakes his head once, as though he’s deciding whether to say it.
“Foster?” I ask.
“It’s just—” He turns back, and his gaze meets Decker’s. There’s an edge there I haven’t seen directed at his brother yet today. “He hid it from me. I just found out.”
Decker meets his gaze. “What?”
“About Ripley.” He pauses, and I can see him selecting the version of this he’s willing to say out loud. “About him and Mom.”
Decker says nothing, and the stifling tension that usually lives in this room reappears.
“Why did you keep that from me? Let me play for him without knowing about him and Mom?” Foster’s voice stays even, which I can tell is only because he’s trying so hard to keep it that way.
Decker’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t deflect. “It wasn’t… I didn’t think it was my thing to tell. It was Mom’s. And by then it had been over for a long time.”
“But you knew, and I didn’t.” Foster still doesn’t raise his voice, a testament, I think, to how badly he wants to improve his relationship with his brother. “The whole time we were rebuilding something, getting close, and you’re sitting on that.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I was twenty years old.”
“I was twenty years old too.”
“And the truth is…”
“What?” Foster positions himself to face Decker directly, resting his back against the arm of the couch.
“I didn’t want you to blow up your entire career,” Decker says.
“Oh, so you had to coddle me?”
“It’s not coddling.” Decker presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. “You know what you would have done, how you would have reacted back then, so let’s not pretend you would have handled that news without blowing up your future.”
Foster sits for a moment, his thumb tracing the same lines on the couch as when we started this conversation, the clench to his jaw he always has when he doesn’t want to admit to something. “Maybe, but…”
I gently step in. “Foster, when you found out—how did it make you feel?”
His gaze never lifts off his brother. “It made me feel stupid. Like I was the last one to know something about my own family. Like I’m the outsider again.”
There it is.
The line from childhood all the way to the present. Foster has spent his whole life feeling like an outsider in his own family—being the last to know things that concern him, his father moving him south, his mother’s life moving on without him. And now this secret.
“I’m sorry,” Decker says. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“Sometimes you have to let people choose their own reactions—good or bad, healthy or not,” I say.
