Free Indiscretion: Volume Four by Elisabeth Grace

said, her voice thick as she raised her head up off my chest.
    “I was the older brother,” my voice cracked around those words. “I knew better. I knew we weren’t supposed to go poking around my father’s office. He looked up to me, always trying to be like me. Following me around, wanting to do what I did. He didn’t want to touch the gun, and I was taunting him with it, twirling it around on my finger when it went off. The gun was in my hands when it killed him.” My voice was flat, dead. As dead as my poor brother.
    Chloe was looking down at me with wide eyes full of concern. She touched her fingers tenderly to my face and it felt good. It felt so good to have someone comfort me, whether I deserved it or not.
    “There’s no way you could’ve known what would happen. Your parents must’ve told you that.”
    And there it was—my biggest source of shame all laid out for her to discover. “My father heard the gun shot and discovered us. He made it look like Peyton accidentally shot himself. I’m sure he had to pay off someone at the coroner’s office, maybe even the police. He said it would cause problems for me if people knew what had actually happened, and that he couldn’t have that for his only remaining son. My mother doesn’t even know I’m the reason she lost her youngest son.” A guttural sob escaped my throat.
    “My God, Max,” she breathed. “You’ve been carrying around this guilt for more than twenty years?” She sounded astonished and...compassionate. How could she feel any compassion for me? She should be appalled that she’d been sharing her bed with a man who could kill his brother, and then go on to live his life like nothing had ever happened.
    “I deserve the guilt. I killed him,” I said with a bitter edge to my voice. “I’ve lied to everyone in my life about it while I live a privileged existence and want for nothing.”
    “Max, I’m not trying to be insensitive, but it was an accident,” she insisted, willing me to believe it. “You were just a kid, there was no way that you could’ve known the outcome. We’ve all done things as kids we’d never do as adults.”
    She looked at me then, with such trust and understanding in her eyes that a small part of me actually had hope that maybe someday I could believe what she said to be true. Chloe wrapped her arms around me and lay her head back down on my chest, tracing her fingertips over top of the homage to my brother I’d had inked onto my skin.
    “Your tattoo…is that for your brother?” she asked softly.
    “Yeah,” I replied simply. The picture was of two birds sitting on a branch, tattooed on my upper arm, representing me and my brother. The name Makya Peyton was underneath, surrounded by an angel’s wings.
    “Makya is an unusual name.”
    “Most people called him Peyton or Pey, but my mother has some Native American in her, and it was my great grandfather’s name. She told me once that she wanted both our names to start with the same letter, too.”
    “I like it. It’s a lovely tribute to your brother,” she said with a smile in her voice.
    “It’s also a reminder to me so I never forget,” I said, my voice serious. “I deserve to live with the fact that he’s no longer here because of me, every day of my life.”
    Chloe inhaled sharply. “Oh, Max. I can’t even imagine what carrying all that guilt around for so many years does to a person. More than twenty years…that’s such a long time. It must’ve changed you in some way.”
    I took a deep breath in and held it for a moment before exhaling. “It did change me. I started trying to be someone I wasn’t from that point on. My brother was the perfect son, so after he was gone I tried to fill that role. It was a conscious decision at first, but somewhere along the way it became second nature.”
    The arms Chloe had wrapped around me squeezed me tighter with that admission. “Things like what you did in that newspaper article about me?”
    I