Maybe too hard, he thought a few hours later as he waited on the same roof. Maybe some breaches were supposed to be there.
He didn’t have to turn around to know that Dante had arrived. That same intuition that had seemed like magic to those around the two of them, dormant for six long years, prickled alive instantly. He knew the very moment Dante stepped out onto the roof.
He didn’t simply know it. He felt it.
He took his time turning, and his brother was there when he did. It had been six years, and yet it felt...right.
“This is anticlimactic,” he said, eyeing the man standing across from him. It was still like looking into a mirror. It was still as if Dante was an extension of himself. This is right, he thought again. “I thought you’d at least have the good grace to be horrifically scarred or stunted in some way.”
“I could fling myself off the balcony in a show of dramatic atonement,” Dante replied in his usual easy manner, though Dario could see the wariness in his eyes. “Of course, that would likely kill me instantly. Much less suffering for me that way, which I’d think would defeat the purpose.”
Dario had to catch himself then, because he almost laughed at that—and this was the trouble. This was his twin. He knew Dante better than he knew himself, in some ways, or he had. He was genetically predisposed to get along with him. These past six years had been torture—and he couldn’t understand how he’d managed to convince himself otherwise. How he’d believed his own lies.
You’ve been lying to yourself for a long, long time, he thought then.
“You betrayed me,” he said starkly, and his brother stiffened. “That was all I knew six years ago. That was all I wanted to know. You hurt me. You, of all people.”
Dante only stared back at him, the way he had then, and said nothing.
“Now I want to know the details,” Dario continued. He realized he’d tensed every muscle in his body and forced himself to relax. As best he could. “Anais has a child. He looks just like us.”
He searched his brother’s face. His own face, at a distance, as identical as it had ever been. As children and teenagers they’d played each other for days at a time to see if anyone noticed the switch. No one ever had.
Dario forced himself to ask the question. “Is he yours?”
“No.”
The word was like a stone hurled from a great height, and it landed between them with the force of too much gravity. Dario was surprised the roof deck didn’t buckle beneath them with the wallop of it. He was surprised he didn’t.
Dante looked stricken and fierce at once. “No. I never touched Anais, Dario. I never laid a single finger on her. I never would.”
And Dario realized that he’d known this, on some level. He must have known this, or he wouldn’t have turned and walked away. He wouldn’t have cut Dante and Anais off so completely, leaving them no recourse, if he’d thought they’d really cheated on him, because why would he have cared what they said then? And he certainly wouldn’t have thrown his revenge aside, ignored the way she’d deliberately aired their private business in the papers, all for the sake of a few family dinners. Not if he’d truly believed she was trying to foist off his brother’s child on him.
Because there was only one way Anais could be so sure Damian was Dario’s. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Only one explanation.
This was what she’d meant, he understood now. This was what she couldn’t live with. It wasn’t only that he’d believed the worst of her. It was that he must have been looking for something hideous to believe about her as his way out, because look how quickly he’d taken it. Look what damage he’d done.
What he didn’t know was why.
“You let me believe otherwise,” he said now to the twin who was the lost part of him. How had he pretended all this time that he was whole when that was laughable at best? He didn’t care that his voice was too thick. “Deliberately.”
Dante moved then, closing the distance between them to stand nearer to Dario at the deck’s rail. He frowned down at the traffic on Central Park West, but Dario knew he didn’t see it.
He saw the past. Dario had lived in that past for too long. He wanted out.
He wanted to be free.
More than that, he wanted his family.
“I did,” Dante admitted. He shook his head. “I hated that you listened to Anais more than to me. I hated that she’d come between us when she was supposed to be nothing more than a business arrangement. You’d married her to give her a green card, not to install her as our third partner.”
Lies upon lies, Dario thought, and all of them his own damned fault. “I didn’t marry her to give her a green card.”
Dante let out a small laugh at that. “That became clear.” He shifted to look at Dario. “You were at that damned meeting with ICE. I thought she’d put you up to it, so I took the opportunity to drop by and get in her face.” He looked rueful. “She doesn’t back down.”
“Not usually,” Dario agreed. “As you’ve likely seen in the tabloids.”
“She threw a glass of water at me.” Dante moved a hand in the air over his chest. “All over me. And that calmed things down. The irony is that we’d actually started talking to each other when you walked in.”
“On you. Coming out of my bedroom, half-dressed.”
“It didn’t even occur to me that you might read it the wrong way,” Dante said in a low voice, “until you did. And I realized you’d obviously never gotten over what happened in college.”
“It seemed like a pattern,” Dario said then. Though in truth, he thought it was the broken trust he’d never gotten over and never forgotten—and maybe that hadn’t been fair. It had been Lucy who had lied, not Dante. But he hadn’t wanted to consider that back then. It had all been a mess. ICE, their past, Anais... “But Anais mattered more. Much more.”
“I never meant any of this to happen,” Dante said fervently. “I never wanted to break up your marriage and I certainly never wanted you to cut me off. I assumed things would go back to normal after you’d had time to cool down. I assumed that, at the very least, you’d come after me. Yell at me. Fight with me. Hell, I thought you’d answer the damn phone, Dario.”
Dario blew out a breath. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I let a moment of silence ruin two relationships.” He looked his brother in the eye, then reached over and clapped his hand to Dante’s shoulder. “You might have done nothing to keep me from believing the worst, Dante. But I’m the one who believed it. That isn’t your fault. It’s mine.”
The evening wore on then, but everything was different. Better.
They sat out on the roof and told each other the stories of their lives over the past six years, and while they were no longer finishing each other’s sentences the way they had as children, it was remarkably easy to get back in tune. To feel connected again. Whole.
Dario hadn’t realized how much he’d missed his brother, or how deeply he’d been fooling himself all this time.
“How did you end up in Hawaii, anyway?” Dante asked. “Didn’t you once claim you didn’t see the purpose of beaches?”
“Maybe I’ve had a radical personality transplant and now enjoy nothing more than lying on a bit of sand, waiting for death or boredom to claim me,” Dario said.
Dante laughed. “Have you?”
“Certainly not.” Dario laughed, too, and it felt good. It felt like a revelation, like another key turned in a lock he hadn’t realized was there, to sit beneath the stars and laugh with his twin again. “I was tracking down a pair of earrings for our possibly