Nathan would be the one cracking jokes at the dinner table,
Pulling faces behind the teacher's back,
Making his friends double over it with laughter.
It wasn't just mischief.
It was more like survival.
Laughter was louder than the silence that filled their home.
Jokes could cover what no one was willing to say out loud.
When news came of his father's death in prison,
Nathan's first reaction wasn't grief,
But more of a shrug.
Good riddance,
He told himself,
Telling anyone who asked that he didn't care.
But the truth was more complicated.
Not caring was safer than feeling what was really there.
Grief would have required facing the rage,
The shame,
The unanswered questions that had been woven into him since childhood.
So Nathan did what he'd always done.
He turned louder,
Brighter,
He partied harder,
Drank more,
Surrounded himself with people who didn't ask about his past,
Guaranteeing he would never have to sit in the quiet.
When Nico sat down to share the truth of what had happened between him and Lauren,
He was serious,
Careful,
And measured.
Nathan took it all in with a kind of glare that made Nico question how it was all landing for his younger brother,
Knowing how much younger he was when it all went down.
His brother had always deflected into avoidance or numbing when things got to be too much.
Nico watched fun become Nathan's armor.
Avoidance became his strategy.
He chased thrills,
The speed of a car taking a corner too fast,
The rush of fists flying in a bar fight,
The oblivion at the bottom of a bottle,
Getting lost in beautiful women that never overstayed their welcome.
He told himself life was short,
That you had to live in the moment,
Because you could never know what was around the next corner.
But beneath the adrenaline was something else.
The boy who had once stood helpless in the shadow of his father's violence,
The boy who had watched his mom crumble under the grief she never spoke of.
Silence had taught Nathan,
If you don't name it,
It can't hurt you.
So he numbed,
Distracted,
Laughed.
Even he almost believed he was fine.
But silence is never empty.
What you refuse to face has a way of shaping you anyway.
And for Nathan,
The ghost of his father's rage and his mother's sorrow lingered beneath every joke,
Every drink,
Every fight,
Just waiting for the day he'd run out of ways to outrun them.
Until he met Lauren.
She arrived in his life like sunlight,
Spilling through the skylight,
Distracting,
Impossible to ignore.
With Lauren,
He didn't always have to be the joke,
Or the party,
The distraction.
She carried her own shadows,
And somehow that made his feel less dark.
For the first time,
He felt maybe he didn't have to run so fast.
Maybe love could be something other than what he'd known so far.
Love doesn't erase what came before.
As their connection deepened,
It ended up pressing on the places that hurt the most.
Nathan wanted her to be the cure for everything he'd buried,
The balm for all the silence he'd turned into noise.
When life began to echo,
The same old disappointments,
Along with the failed treatments,
The unspoken grief,
The endless tears,
He did what he'd always done.
He turned louder,
Brighter,
More reckless.
Beneath it all,
Nathan still believed the same thing he had felt as a boy,
When he couldn't stop his mother's tears,
Standing in the doorway,
Watching her shoulders shake,
Knowing there was nothing he could do to fix what his father had broken.
The same helplessness returned years later,
Each time Lauren crumbled under another negative pregnancy test,
Another round of injections,
Another month of disappointment.
He tried jokes,
Distractions,
Bike rides,
Dinner with friends,
Anything to keep her from drowning.
But when nothing worked,
When she still wept,
He felt the same unbearable truth rise in him.
He just couldn't accept that he was powerless to stop it.
What Nathan didn't understand yet was that pain doesn't disappear when you refuse to speak it.
It waits,
As if waiting inside of you.
It waits inside your marriage.
It waits for the moment that truth can no longer be outrun.
