Karma by Phillips Carly Page B

she asked.
    “It was livable. A lot of kids, which made it easy for me to fly under the radar. And Nash used to bring me his old clothes and extra food at school.” And though he was grateful, he still felt so damned guilty accepting anything from the couple at all.
    “What happened when Ethan came home last year?” she asked, perceptively jumping ahead to the real family drama.
    “Nothing good. Nash and I wanted nothing to do with him and I doubt we would ever have made peace if it weren’t for Tess.” As always, he couldn’t help but smile when he thought of his half sister. “She was the result of the affair we didn’t know my father had.”
    “Ouch.”
    “Yeah. Kelly is her half sister too. They share the same mother and she’s another story all on her own. But she abandoned Tess, and when Kelly couldn’t deal with her anymore she dropped her off on Ethan’s doorstep for the summer. And that’s what forced us to come to terms with the past and with each other.”
    “And you’re all living happily ever after?” she asked.
    “Nothing so fairy tale–like, but yeah, we’ve become a solid unit.”
    “You’re so lucky,” she whispered.
    Dare was uncomfortable, his arm falling asleep. He readjusted his position on the bed, helping Liza settle into the pillows beside him. Then he propped himself up on his other arm and met her heavy-lidded gaze.
    “You need sleep.” The pain pill had obviously kicked in.
    “Soon but not yet.” Her brown eyes studied him earnestly. “I like talking to you.”
    Dare smiled. “I do too.” In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d bared his soul to anyone about his childhood, but he couldn’t regret having done it with Liza. “Your turn, though.”
    He knew the medication had lowered her inhibitions, but that didn’t mean he minded getting whatever information she wanted to give.
    She yawned and he thought that would be the end of their sharing.
    “My parents should never have had kids.”
    He was wrong and he couldn’t be more pleased she was opening up to him.
    “But they had me and then they had Brian. I don’t know why, but I was always in the way. Brian was the golden child, the boy who made Dad proud just by being born. But even with that, my parents couldn’t really be bothered with us. They were rarely there. Even when they were present, they weren’t there.”
    Her eyes had glazed over with the memories and Dare hesitated to interrupt. Her voice was slurred a bit and he knew she didn’t have much more talking left in her.
    “So Brian started acting out early on. He ran with a rough crowd, my parents never knew where he was and he’d always come home drunk or high.”
    She frowned, which wrinkled her nose, and it was all Dare could do not to lean over and kiss her right then and there.
    “And then there was that party…” She shook her head.
    That she didn’t groan in pain told him the pills were definitely working. And knowing where she was headed next, Dare almost wished he could take one of those pills too.
    “I was supposed to be home that night keeping an eye on him because my parents had grounded him and taken his car keys. But I’d just started going out with this older guy and he kept begging me to go out with him that night.” She exhaled hard. “I agreed. I figured since Brian couldn’t take the car, I could leave for a couple of hours and come back home after.”
    Dare didn’t ask what happened next. He already knew.
    “What I didn’t know was that Brian had told Jesse—that’s the guy I was seeing—that as long as he brought him a keg of beer, he wouldn’t tell my parents I ditched babysitting.”
    “So that’s where the alcohol came from.”
    “I felt so guilty,” she said, her voice cracking.
    “Hey, you did a normal teenage thing. You weren’t the one who bought alcohol for minors.”
    “But I brought Jesse into Brian’s orbit and I bailed on my responsibility. If it weren’t for me, Stuart Rossman