Twin brothers Brian and Matt Walker went to live with their mother’s brother after the death of their parents at an early age. Brian is still wracked with the guilt he carries around from a young age and sees the world through a distorted lens of self-loathing. When he meets a sexy and interested college-aged guy at the beginning of his senior year of high school, he may have finally found someone who can help him escape his mundane existence.<br><br>Matt has his life all planned out -- he longs for a solid career in journalism after graduating college. But his tenuous hold on family life threatens his dreams of independence, as does the attentions of a closeted new transfer to their school.<br><br>Can Matt pull away enough from his family to come into his own? And will Brian finally get to grips with his past and allow his twin to chase his own happiness?

Twice the Hands to Hold

Another photo of the boys and him, much older, kneeling around their parents’ graves pulling out weeds from between the rocks where his sister and her husband laid side by side, fresh flowers in the vase between the two graves.


He’d tried his best, Jake conceded and closed his eyes. He had fallen so severely short over the years, but Lord knows he’d given it everything he had. He’d always accepted his parents had stopped loving him, never seeing the man he had become, or even caring to. But this showed his mother never forgot them, was never able to lock them out of her heart.


He flipped another photograph and stared at the contented faces of his nephews and his own tired, bleary, but happy eyes as they each held a small ice cream cone, his nephews enraptured by zoo’s giraffe. He remembered that day clearly. He’d wanted to do something special but simple for his nephews because he was unable to pay for the upcoming school trip to the space museum the coming week.


Chapter 52