“…have to stop. Caleb wouldn’t want this…”

His name. Coming from her sweet voice.

My arm is pulled back, ready to strike again, and I freeze, suspended in indecision.

My eyes race over the scene in front of me.

Blood. Deep, dark red. Everywhere.

Beckham’s face.

The bed.

The floor, where we ended up.

My hands.

Caleb.

His body, his head, floating in a crimson pool of blood.

Dead.

Yanking my arm away, I shrug Hudson off me and stagger backward, my trembling hands raised in surrender, overwhelmed with memories. Tasha rushes past me to Beckham’s side, hyperventilating as she checks on him, and as I retreat into the hallway, my eyes lock firmly on Hudson’s thin frame. Kneeling on the floor, her shoulders hunch with despair as sobs rack through her body. Her focus is neither on me nor Beckham. Instead, she’s staring down at her hands resting on her lap and the shattered cigarette case lying flat in her palm.

“Hey, man. Sorry I had to bail on you the last couple of nights. I had to take care of some things back home.” Rory offers an apologetic smile as I approach the bar, my mind still encased in a dense fog. “Brody said you were looking for me. What’s going on? You look like shit.”

I sit on the stool and stare at him, but say nothing. It’s all I can do to not breakdown right now.

“Crew? You all right man? What happened?” he asks sharply, leaning over the bar toward me.

“I need…I was wondering, uh…” Fumbling over my words, I stop and shake my head, attempting to clear my thoughts before starting over. “I’m looking for a place to stay for a little while, and I was hoping I could crash on your couch. I’ve got a little money saved up, and I don’t want to waste it on a hotel while I try to figure out where I’m going permanently.”

“You plan on sticking around here, man, after everything that’s happened? You’re not going back to Texas?”

I hesitate, opening and closing my mouth. “There’s nothing back there for me,” I finally manage.

“Something for you here?” He cocks his eyebrow with interest.

Hudson’s face flits through my mind and my heart lurches painfully.

“Not anymore.” I grip the hair by my temples with my fists, my head suddenly pounding.

He glances down at my bloody knuckles, which I tried to wipe off with a napkin in my car, and sighs heavily. “Did you do anything that’s gonna land you in jail?”

I shrug. “I guess if he wants to press charges it’s a possibility.”

“Whose blood? Yours?”

I can’t help the smirk that tips the side of my mouth. “Beckham’s. I’ve been staying at Tasha’s.”

Without bothering to hide the scowl on his face, he slams his hands down on the polished wood and releases a string of curses, garnering the attention of the handful of customers in for an early lunch. “Fucking shit, Crew. What did I tell you about messing with that girl?” he roars. “I warned you repeatedly, and yet you still ignored me. I knew…I knew when you left here Monday, something just like this would happen. I wasn’t trying to be a cock-blocking asshole. I was trying to be your friend.”

After hushing him and glancing around, I give him the short version of what happened. After staring at me in silence—judging me, I know, but I deserve it—he sighs and slides a bottle of water over to me and opens one for himself, swallowing nearly half of it in one gulp.

“I’ve got a spare couch for you, but you’ve gotta get your shit together, Crew. My life here is drama-free, and I really fucking like it that way,” he says more calmly, though his tone is full of conviction. “I know what happened to your brother really fucked you up. I can’t even pretend to imagine how you feel, but you’re spiraling out of control and don’t even realize it. You need to stop being so goddamn selfish and face your demons. What happened was an accident. You could spend the rest of your life playing What If, but the truth is you’ll never know, so stop punishing yourself and the people who love you. Your mom has already lost one of her sons. Do you really want her to lose both? Is that what Caleb would want?”

His last sentence echoes in my head as I choke on the shame thickening in the back of my throat.

Is that what Caleb would want?

Is that what Caleb would want?

Is that what Caleb would want?

I have to get out of here. He’s right; it was past time to man up. “I gotta go, but I’ll be back to take you up on that offer,” I call out over my shoulder, bustling toward the exit with one destination in mind. My family’s apartment.

My confidence shrinks with each passing mile, and by the time I’m fitting the key inside the lock on the front door, I’m moving at a snail’s pace. I don’t know if I can do this.

All of the moisture disappears from my mouth as I let myself in, the stale smell of death lingering in the frigid air. Sluggishly placing one foot in front of the other, I eventually make my way down the hall to Caleb’s bedroom and stop in the doorway, sucking in a deep, agonizing breath as my eyes dart around the small space.

Looking around, I can’t comprehend it’s been almost four weeks since my little brother fell and cracked his skull open during a seizure, which eventually led to him bleeding to death. The autopsy showed therapeutic levels of marijuana in his system, so we’ll never know what went wrong. The autopsy showed he died of blood loss, but the lack of marks on his hands indicate he was unconscious by then. If he’d be clawing his way to the door, there would have been evidence. Mom found comfort in that. I didn’t. I should have been here.

The floor has been scrubbed of the sea of blood and the bed has been remade as if it’s waiting for him to return anytime now. All of his personal things remain on display, and his clothes still hang in the closet.

Robotically, I inch into the room, an onslaught of raw emotions raining down on me with every painful step. Breathing normal is fucking impossible as the tightness in my chest intensifies, the memories associated with everything I see overwhelming. Irrepressible tears fall freely down my face, and I don’t even bother wiping the wetness away.

Bending down next to his beanbag chair, I pick up the video game controller and trace my fingertips over each of the rubber buttons, sobbing as I think about how many hours Caleb spent with this in his hands. It would’ve been at the top of his list for most prized possessions.

After I return the plastic device to where it was, I stand up and walk over to his dresser, where the black Denver Broncos beanie he bought in the airport when we first landed in Colorado sits. Lifting it to my face, the refreshing scent of the shampoo we’ve always shared inundates my nose, and I remember him telling me the shampoo was a chick magnet.

“No girl can resist the just-walked-through-a-waterfall smell. They all want to touch it and play with it while they rub their boobs against your arm,” he’d claimed with a shit-eating smirk plastered across his face.

I chuckle lightly at the memory. God, that kid was something else. Everyone loved Caleb. His smile and easygoing attitude were infectious, and more than anything, he was genuine.

Setting the hat down, I open the top drawer of the chest and, not surprisingly, I find two perfectly folded stacks of t-shirts, the way Mom always organized our clothes. I pull a few out and images of him wearing each of them appear in my mind, a big, goofy grin spread across his face every time.

When I go to pull the next one out, something shiny in the back of the drawer catches my eye, and I hurriedly move the rest of the shirts out of the way to see what it is. A loud laugh erupts from me when I find a handheld vaporizer, a small sack of weed, and a lighter. My little brother kept a secret stash that all of the cops and detectives who had been here didn’t even find. After they found no sign of forced entry or foul play, and the autopsy didn’t show anything suspicious, the case was officially closed as an accidental death.