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Ryan shoved my shoulder. “Just start talking. Hell, start from the beginning. Give us the CliffsNotes, but tell us something.” He tossed back his shot before filling his glass again.
Starting at the beginning wasn’t something I was interested in. Plus, most of that no longer applied. Too much time had passed between who we were then and where we were now. After downing my shot, I refilled my glass and knocked it back too.
Ryan narrowed his eyes. “Did Claudia give you her number tonight?”
“She did.”
“We’ll get to her in a minute,” Nick said, waving a hand. “Shelby first.”
I rounded the bar, pulled out a stool, and sat facing them. “I don’t know where to start.”
Both Nick and Ryan jumped in, shooting out questions, talking over each other like a couple of little kids. I raised a hand to shut them up.
“I don’t know how to end things with Shelby.” There. That was as good a place to start as any.
“But why? What keeps you so firmly rooted?” Nick asked. “You’re not being blackmailed, right?” He swallowed hard, no doubt remembering the hell he’d gone through before being reunited with Jess.
“No, it’s nothing like what you went through,” I reassured him, thinking back at the absolute insanity my baby brother was forced to shoulder on his own before he let us in.
Ryan’s face paled slightly. “She’s not pregnant, is she?”
I recoiled, realizing how much more trapped I’d feel if she were. “No. Stop guessing.”
“Then tell us, already.”
“I think about ending things a lot, but then I feel so guilty that I can’t get past it,” I admitted, embarrassed at how weak I sounded.
“Why the guilt? Because she was there for you after baseball ended?” Ryan asked. He was so sincere, I could tell that he really wanted to understand the position I was in, and he didn’t know any of the details.
“For one, yeah. She was there when no one else was. She literally picked me up from the floor when I didn’t want to stand anymore.” I sighed, recalling the dark time when I realized I’d lost everything I’d worked my whole life for.
“I can understand that,” Ryan said, and Nick nodded in agreement.
“But there’s more. You guys know she was raised by a single dad, right?” I furrowed my brow, wondering if I’d ever filled them in on that.
“I didn’t know,” Nick said. “I probably know the least since I was so young when this all happened.”
Nick and I were ten years apart, so he was just a little kid when I had moved out. And when everything went downhill for me in college, the last person I was going to talk to about it was a ten-year-old.
“Shelby’s dad was all she had. It was just the two of them her whole life. He was a great guy, really supportive and loving. I swear to God, I was actually working up the nerve to end things with Shelby,” I said, shaking my head as I recalled the memory. “I wasn’t happy in the relationship anymore. Not for any particular reason, though.”
Sighing, I admitted, “I just realized that I stopped looking forward to coming home and having her there. I started doing everything I could to put off going home. I’d run errands and get shit we didn’t need, all because I felt trapped and hated walking through that front door. One night, I’d given myself a pep talk the whole drive home, but when I walked in, Shelby was on the kitchen floor in tears, her cell phone at her side. It was her dad. He was really sick. We’d just had dinner with him a few nights before, you know? And we didn’t have any idea because he kept it from us. He thought he would eventually get better and not have to ever tell us, but he didn’t.”
I stopped and took a deep breath. Losing Shelby’s dad had been one of the hardest things I’d ever witnessed. It wasn’t easy watching a strong man you admired fade away to nothing, right before our eyes. It was beyond heartbreaking, and it happened so quickly.
“I’d never felt more powerless than in those months before he passed. But on his deathbed . . .” I tried to compose myself as I remembered how tired his eyes had been, but also how much hope they still held out for his only daughter and me. “As he lay there dying, he made me promise that I’d always look after Shelby. He begged me to take care of her, told me he was leaving her in my hands, and that he couldn’t imagine her with a better guy. He said he trusted me to always do the right thing by her.”
My head dropped, the obligation I felt toward Shelby and her father weighing on me like a Mack truck. Telling my brothers about it had relieved the pressure a little, but it could never remove it from me completely.
“I never told Shelby what he said to me. I couldn’t.”
“Jesus, Frank,” Nick said softly. “That’s some really heavy shit. And you’re walking around all day every day carrying all that on your shoulders?”
I looked up to see both my brothers watching me, their eyes filled with a mixture of sympathy and pain. I hated seeing it. I didn’t want them feeling sorry for me. Every decision I had made about Shelby was of my own doing. No matter the reasoning behind it, I was still responsible for my situation.
“Everything makes so much sense,” Ryan finally said.
“Yeah?” I asked.
