LOVING ME AND MY QUADRUPLETS

The Brother Left Behind

Chapter 3 — Marcus' POV

I couldn't believe my brother was gone.

The grief sat in my chest like something physical, something I could press my hand against and still feel pulsing there, refusing to let up. I hadn't cried this hard since we lost our parents all those years ago — and even then, I remembered being too young to fully understand what I'd lost. This time I understood everything. That was what made it so much worse.

After our parents died, Vince became everything to me. He wasn't just my brother. He was my guardian, my role model, the only steady thing in a world that had pulled the ground out from under us both. While other boys our age worried about school dances and video games, Vince worked two, sometimes three, menial jobs just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.

There were nights I never knew about until years later — nights he went to bed hungry so I could eat. Nights he slept on the cold floor of our tiny apartment so I could have the bed, telling me the next morning that he'd "actually preferred the floor," like I was stupid enough to believe that. No matter how hard things got, no matter how many doors got slammed in his face when he asked for work, he never once complained in front of me.

He always found a way. That was just who he was.

Starting with absolutely nothing — no inheritance, no connections, nothing but stubbornness and a mind sharper than anyone gave him credit for — Vince built Vance Logistics from the ground up. I watched him turn a single delivery van into a fleet, watched him shake hands with men twice his age who underestimated him right up until the moment he outmaneuvered them. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he never stopped moving until he had it.

Just last week — *last week* — we'd sat together in his office going over expansion plans for the new branch. I was about to graduate from university, and he'd already decided he wanted to put me in charge of one of the new locations. I remembered laughing with him that day, the two of us leaning over blueprints and spreadsheets like a couple of kids playing pretend, except none of it was pretend. It was real. It was ours. We talked about the future like it was something guaranteed to us, like we'd finally earned the right to stop worrying.

Now all of it had died with him on a flight he never should have needed to take.

Growing up without parents wasn't easy. I don't think people who grew up with two parents in the house understand what it costs a kid to grow up without either one — the hunger, some weeks literal, some weeks just the hunger for someone to check if you'd eaten. The hardship that never really goes away, just changes shape. The way people look at you differently once they find out you don't have a mother or father to speak for you.

Whenever anyone tried to bully me — and there were plenty who did, plenty who thought two orphaned brothers were easy targets — Vince was always there. Not always right away, not always in time to stop the first punch, but always there before it went further. His courage alone was usually enough to make people think twice before crossing either of us. He never had to say much. He just had a way of standing that told you exactly what would happen if you pushed him.

We made a promise to each other once, back when I was maybe twelve and scared out of my mind after our mother's funeral. We were sitting on the fire escape of our old apartment, and Vince put his arm around me and told me we would never face life alone. Not ever. No matter what happened, no matter how bad things got, we had each other, and that was enough.

Death had just broken that promise.

My brother would never see me walk across that graduation stage in a few weeks. He would never sit in the front row like he'd promised, filming it on his phone and embarrassing me the way older brothers do. He would never watch his nieces grow up — never see Mandy take her first steps, never hear Michelle's first word, never spoil Mabel and Mirabel the way he already planned to before they were even born.

I sat alone in my apartment that night, the one Vince had helped me move into, staring at nothing. Every object in the room seemed to hold a memory of him — the couch he'd insisted on buying me even when I told him I could save up myself, the framed photo on the shelf of the two of us standing in front of the very first Vance Logistics warehouse, both of us grinning like idiots because we couldn't believe we'd actually done it.

For the first time in my life, I felt truly, completely alone.

I thought about Anna, about the girls, about how none of them deserved any of this. I thought about how I was supposed to be strong for her now, the way Vince had always been strong for me, except I didn't feel strong. I felt like the twelve-year-old boy on that fire escape all over again, except this time there was no older brother to put his arm around me and promise things would be okay.

I don't know how long I sat there before my phone buzzed. It was Anna. I almost didn't answer — I wasn't sure I had anything left to give her, not that night. But I picked up anyway, because that was what Vince would have done. That was what he would have expected of me.

I had no idea, sitting there in the dark, that the conversation waiting for me on the other end of that call would be the one that made me start questioning everything I thought I understood about my brother's death.