He stared off into the middle distance for a bit and then sighed, eating some more. “He was dropping weight like crazy. We were at dinner and he disappeared right in the middle of it. Like he said he was going to the bathroom and he just didn’t come back. We were eating with some people from Rolling Stone magazine, for God’s sake! So I thought, maybe he fell or hurt himself, and I went to find him. He was still in the john, his goddamned rig in his arm, passed out on the toilet.”

She’d seen it herself more than once, and bile rose at the memory. Just imagining someone as hale and hearty as Ezra like that was sick-making. Hearing Paddy talk about it, though, that was worse. She heard the anger, the hurt and she understood it so well.

At the same time, she resented it a little because her father never really had that experience of getting himself together. She’d never known him when he wasn’t screwed up.

“I only managed to not kick his ass because Jeremy had come to find us. We got Ezra a cab to the hotel and Jeremy went with him. I went back to the table and made excuses saying Ezra was sick and Jeremy had taken him back to rest. An article came out in the next issue about us. And it wasn’t good.

“But by that point, things were so bad in the band, it didn’t matter what Rolling Stone had said. It was like Ezra had taken on addiction like he had making the band a success. He’d embraced heroin like it was family. He blew off sound check. One of us had to constantly be with him before a show or he’d be hours late. It’s when I started filling in that space for him onstage and taking over more of the vocals. We had to because he just wasn’t showing up. Hell, even when he was physically there, he wasn’t really showing up. Then he f**king nodded off onstage. Just right there in front of thousands of people. He was already playing so bad, they’d turned off his amps so no one could hear him. And he just fell asleep. Standing up. It was like at that moment I was looking at a stranger who’d killed my brother. The rage just drowned me.” And a lot of shame, she supposed. Fear. Helplessness. “I hated him so much in that moment.”

She remembered this part. Remembered seeing the footage on television. Remembered, too, that sudden, cold-as-ice rage and hatred at another person.

“You charged him. Right there onstage and knocked him to the ground.”

“I did. In front of the whole world, apparently.” He snorted. “I should have known you’d have seen it. That film haunts me to this day. But I had just... He wasn’t even my brother anymore. It was like something had taken him over. It was an ugly, horrible thing. An abomination. He’d been stealing from us. From his family. Let people into our lives who didn’t care about f**king us over. They just needed money for drugs. And they were everywhere! Jeremy and the label people had stepped in, and they did a pretty good job at keeping them out of the backstage area. But Ezra would ditch his keepers to get drugs. My big brother never would have done that. Never would have abandoned what we’d built together. He endangered everything, including his own life. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry.”

She reached out to draw the pad of her thumb over his knuckles.

Paddy looked up, his faraway gaze snapping into place, seeing her. Knowing she had been there. “You understand me. Sometimes it scares me how much you do. You understand the fear and the rage. The guilt. The moments when you just hate them so much for not choosing you over using.”

She managed a smile, but she had her own fear to choke past. “Yeah.”

“So we got in a fight in front of all those people. He hit his head on a corner of a speaker, split it open. Facial wounds are the worst. They bleed so much. But he didn’t even get it then.”

He drew a shaky breath. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Why not? That’s how you grow to know someone. You share things with them.”

“It’s not really my story to tell. Ezra isn’t that anymore.”

“Sometimes you share a bad memory to let that other person share that burden. Or maybe you give them a piece of yourself to see if they can be trusted. You said it yourself. I understand. And I’m envious because Ezra is stronger than my father, and he got his act together. No, you weren’t the one addicted, Paddy, but it’s your story as much as it is his. Addiction isn’t just about the person with the habit.”

She had known in the back of her mind, even back in July when he’d first reappeared in her life, that to open the door even a crack would mean something she couldn’t have expected. It was probably why she’d tried to hold him back. Why she’d tried to keep control of all those things that could hurt so very much if they went bad.

He was beautiful and clever and talented and funny, but he brought so much into her life that scared her so much. Caring about him the way she did meant he had the power to hurt her more than even those years growing up couldn’t compare to.

Because this... These moments were about giving him access to all her wounds. Because his sharing meant she had access to his and the responsibility to be what he needed. Hell, to figure out what it was he did need, which was more than head-nodding. Sometimes he’d need the harsh truth, and she’d have to hurt him a little to help him in the big picture, and what if she f**ked it up?

He brought the hand on his to his mouth and kissed it. “I guess you’d know that more than most. They patched him up backstage, and then he disappeared. We looked for him. Found him in a place that made that hotel at the bowling alley look like the Four Seasons. He was so ugly. Dope sick. He said some stuff we had to actually deal with in therapy.” He shivered.