Sacred Sins

never have a chance to drive a car, to fall in love, to start a family. He's dead, and the fact that I'm responsible hasn't anything to do with ego.”
    “Doesn't it?” Ben rose as well, and before she could turn away, took her shoulders. “You're supposed to be perfect, always in control, always having the answers, the solutions? This time you didn't have them and you weren't quite indestructible. You tell me, could you have stopped him from going to that bridge?”
    “I should've been able to.” The sob was dry and shaky as she pressed the heel of her hand between her brows. “No. No, I couldn't give him enough.”

    With his arm around her again, he drew her back to the bed. For the first time in their relationship he felt needed, leaned on. In the normal course of events it would have been his cue to make for the door. Instead he sat with her, taking her hand as her head rested on his shoulder. Complete. It was odd and a little frightening to feel complete.
    “Tess, this is the boy you told me about before, isn't it?”
    She remembered the night of her dream, the night she'd woken to find Ben warm, and willing to listen. “Yes. I've been worried about what he might do for weeks.”
    “And you told his parents?”
    “Yes, I told them, but—”
    “They didn't want to hear it.”
    “It shouldn't have made any difference. I should have been able to—” She broke off when he turned her face to his. “No,” she said on a long breath, “they didn't want to hear it. His mother pulled him out of therapy.”
    “And cut the strings.”
    “It might have pushed him a bit further inward, but I don't think it was the final factor that drove him to suicide.” The grief was still there, cold and hard in her stomach, but her mind was clearing enough for her to see past her own involvement. “I think something else happened tonight.”
    “And you think you know what it was?”

    “Maybe.” She rose again, unable to sit. “I've been trying to contact Joey's father for weeks. His phone's disconnected. I even went by his apartment a few days ago, but he'd moved without leaving a forwarding address. He was supposed to spend this weekend with Joey.” Tess rubbed tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “Joey had been counting on it, too heavily. When his father didn't come for him, it was another brick on his back. Maybe the last one he could carry. He was a beautiful boy, a young man really.” Fresh tears started, but this time the grief loosened and came clean. “He'd had such a tough time, and yet there was this warmth just under the surface, this great need to be loved. He just didn't believe he deserved to have anyone really care about him.”
    “And you cared.”
    “Yes. Maybe too much.”
    It was strange, but the small, hard ball of resentment coated with a thin layer of bitterness that he'd carried in his gut since his brother's death began to break apart. He looked at her—the aloof, the objective psychiatrist, the poker and prodder of minds—and saw the real and human scars of grief, not just for the patient, but for the boy.
    “Tess, what his mother said back at the hospital …”
    “It doesn't matter.”
    “Yes, it does. She was wrong.”
    Tess turned away, and in the dim light from the hallway saw her own reflection in the mirror above her dresser. “Only partly. You see, I'll never know if I'd pushed in a different direction, tried another angle, whether it would have made a difference.”
    “She was wrong,” Ben repeated. “A few years ago I said some of those same things. Maybe I was wrong too.”
    In the glass her gaze shifted and met his. He was still sitting on the bed, in the shadows. He looked alone. It was strange, because she had considered him a man constantly surrounded by friends, good feelings, his own self-confidence. She turned, but not certain he wanted her to reach out, remained where she was.
    “I've never told you about Josh, my brother.”
    “No. You've never told me much about your family. I didn't know you had a brother.”

    “He was almost four years older than me.” It didn't take the use of the past tense to tell her Josh was dead. She'd known it as soon as Ben had said the name. “He was one of those people who have gold on the ends of their fingers. No matter what he did, he did it better than anyone else. When we were kids we had this set of Tinker Toys. I'd built a little car, Josh would build a sixteen-wheeler. In school I'd maybe pull