Nita returned shortly. “Okay, where were we?” As she picked up her glass, her gaze caught on Casey’s hand. She frowned. “Let me see that lighter.”

Casey hesitated, and she stuck out her open palm. He felt his face heating but passed it to her anyway.

“I remember this. This was your dad’s.” She turned it around, studying the old-school Harley-Davidson badge on the front. There was a date etched above it by the manufacturer, the same year Casey had been born. “You miss him, still?”

He shrugged and took the lighter back. “I barely remember him—he left two days before my fifth birthday.” He’d found that lighter a couple of weeks later, wedged between the cushion and arm of his old man’s recliner. His mom hadn’t even gotten angry when he’d killed one of the only trees in their yard, trying to set it on fire. She’d just looked at that lighter and held his face to her hip, and she’d cried. She’d said, “I’m mad at him, too.” Casey had rediscovered the lighter in the junk drawer not long after, and kept it to himself ever since.

“For what it’s worth, I was surprised when he left town,” Nita said. “He loved you boys.”

Casey frowned. “You think?”

“Oh yes. He bragged about you both. Never within your earshot, but he used to come by to fix my old Pacer—Tom Grossier was the best mechanic in this town,” she added, and sipped her wine. “Was and still would be. Anyway, I’d bring him a coffee or a beer, and I’d mention whatever I’d seen you and your brother getting up to in the yard that day, and his face just lit up, every time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He always told me exactly how tall Vince was, right down to the half inch—like I didn’t see the boy every day with my own eyes. And he was always going on about how smart you were.”

“Smart?”

“Oh yes. About how you’d invented a new game, or taken something apart to see how it worked.”

“Jeez. All I remember is getting yelled at, for breaking stuff.”

Her smile turned sad. “Well, fathers can be like that with their sons. They can equate praise with coddling, I think—my own father was like that with my brothers. And Fortuity’s not the kind of town a man wants to subject a softhearted child to.”

“No, I guess not.”

“But come on, Casey. The suspense is killing me. What was the bad news?”

“I, um . . .” He lowered his voice, even knowing his mom would be tuned in one thousand percent to whatever crap was on the TV. “I found out that Vince and I . . . That we don’t have the same mother. Our mom isn’t his mom.”

Nita’s expression changed, but not as Casey might have expected. There was no puzzlement there, no shock. The realization hit him in an instant. “You knew?”

She nodded. “I did, yes.”

“Jesus.” He’d said it too loud, and she shot him a cautious look. He said it again, more quietly. “You fucking knew, all these years? Since when?”

“Since after I’d known Dee maybe a year or so. She and your dad moved here when Vince was tiny—just a few months old. No one had any reason to suspect she wasn’t his natural mother. But then when she was pregnant with you, she told me. You were her first and only biological child, after all. I think she needed to tell someone. Everyone assumed she’d already been through childbirth once before. That couldn’t have been much fun.”

“So who in the fuck is Vince’s real mom?”

She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Dee never talked about her much, except to say she was your father’s ex-girlfriend. And she didn’t think too highly of her—that’s for sure. Though how could she? She loved your brother like a son. He was her son. Imagining how another woman could ever give him up was beyond her.”

“How the fuck am I supposed to break this to Vince?”

Nita looked cagey, fiddling with the stem of her glass. “Do you think it’s even wise to?”

“You think I can just know this, just sit on this news, and not tell him?”

Nita studied the tabletop a moment, then met his eyes with her brown ones. “You have to understand a couple things, Casey. Firstly, that your mother loved you both—loved Vince as much as she does you, her own biological son, and even with Tom leaving her the way he did. And she still loves you both, in her way. But secondly you need to understand that Vince loves her, too, in spite of everything that’s happened. He’s sacrificed a lot to stay here, to take care of her, to provide for her.”

Casey felt his legs go leaden at that, guilt catching like an anchor.

“Vince might talk big about how loyal he is to this town, especially with that casino coming down the pike,” Nita said, “but he truly committed to Fortuity when he committed to your mom. He accepted that he was stuck here for as long as she lives, and at some point, he must have decided to make the most of it.”

And sadly, “making the most of it” in Fortuity amounted to menial jobs or physical labor for most people.

“But that makes it even more fucking unfair,” Casey said. And it made him feel like more of a world-class shit than ever, for not having been the one who’d stepped up and stuck around. “That Vince could’ve gone someplace else, been something more. But he chose to stay here, to take care of a woman who’s not even his real mother?” And if he hadn’t, it would’ve been down to me. And what scared Casey worst of all was trying to guess if he’d have done as his brother had. Manned up, been the good son. He honestly couldn’t say.

“Think about it this way, Casey.” Nita took a long drink from her now dwindling glass. “What do you think would’ve happened to Vince, if he hadn’t had your mother tethering him to Fortuity?”

“I dunno. And none of us’ll ever know, since he never got the chance to find out.”

She smiled sadly. “Your brother’s no saint, honey. Even with all these responsibilities, he’s been to prison twice, and jail more times than I can count. And that’s with your mom to worry about.”

Casey considered that. “So, what? You think he’d be even worse off if he wasn’t stuck caring for her?”

She made a noncommittal face. “No one can say for certain. But if he’s been as careless as he has, with the fights and the drinking and the questionably come-by cars, all with a major responsibility on his shoulders . . . I’m just saying, it wouldn’t have shocked me if Vince wound up serving a far longer sentence in his life, if it weren’t for your mother’s decline. I think that loyalty could quite easily have saved his life, in fact. Vince, more than most anyone I know, needs something to be loyal to. Take that away, and I don’t care to guess where his life may have gone.”

Casey felt sad at that—sad way deep down, enough to ache. He’d never thought too deeply about his brother’s motivations. Vince was an open book in most ways, so unapologetic there seemed no reason for him to keep secrets. Casey, on the other hand . . . He was used to serving only his own interests, and he’d done things he wasn’t proud of. He kept secrets not only because the truth could get him incarcerated for the rest of his life, but also because he knew in the back of his head, he didn’t want decent people—people like Nita or Duncan and especially not Abilene—to know about them. Though now I’ve got no choice but to do better. All his excuses had been obliterated by that one phone call. And more even than he needed to start doing better; for the first time in his life, he wanted that.

“So you don’t think I should tell Vince?” he asked Nita.

“Only you can decide that, Casey. But before you do, ask yourself what there is to be gained from him knowing the truth.”

What there was to be gained . . .

It was so fucking tricky, trying to be a good man. He’d have thought that being honest was the simple answer. That the truth was always best. But she had a point.

The truth would bring Vince, what? Pain and confusion, maybe a full-on fucking identity crisis. The knowledge that he’d spent the past decade caring for a woman who wasn’t his real mother.