In Honor Read Free

to kick your ass into gear. There’s a big world out there and I’m seeing it now—the good and the bad. And you will too. Have a few adventures while you’re out there. Put your feet in the ocean. Watch the stars disappear into morning. Then when I get back we’ll compare notes.
How’s that for a “real letter”? Everything you thought it’d be? Wise and inspiring, since it’s on paper? I tried. Just so you know, that took me twice as long as an e-mail would have. Hope you’re happy.
     
Love,
Finn
     
PS — Do me a favor—next time you see Kyra Kelley, make sure you tell her all about your handsome older brother.
     
    Something deep in my chest unhinged. Overflowed. Tore through every little space in me until I thought I might burst. It was so Finn, so what he’d say, that I let myself think for a second that he wasn’t actually gone. I ran my finger over the indentations of his pen strokes. He had no idea when he wrote it that I would sit at our kitchen table and read it after his funeral, or that I wouldn’t laugh or shake my head but weep as quietly as I could, so I wouldn’t wake Gina.
    Hot tears cut silent paths down my cheeks. I set the letter down on the table and wiped the wetness from my face. The seconds ticked away in the heat of the evening, and the pages in front of me fluttered lightly beneath the lazy current of the ceiling fan.
    Pages. There were more than one. After another deep breath, I gently lifted the one with his handwriting on it away from the two behind it, almost afraid of what they might be. And seated alone at the kitchen table, in the sad quiet of the house, I laughed when I saw.
    I laughed out loud, but without any sort of joy, because this had to be a joke. All of it. The car accident that took my parents, the hand-rigged bomb that took my brother, and now this. A letter he had to have sent to me months ago, when the road really was wide open, and the two tickets to Kyra Kelley’s farewell concert were the perfect punch line to his PS joke.
    He would’ve written that last line with a smile, knowing I’d get it as soon as I looked at the printouts. He would’ve known I’d stare at the seat numbers wondering how, from half a world away, he’d managed to get tickets to her very last show. And he probably would have pictured Lilah and me going nuts over them, then immediately shifting into planning mode for the trip out to California for the concert.
    But really, it should’ve been me and him.
    When I turned fourteen, he surprised me with a trip in the Impala all the way down to Austin to see her sing, and I swore she smiled at us in the front row. When I turned sixteen, he let me drive to the show in San Antonio, and when she looked our way more than once, I decided she remembered us. Miles of road and gallon after gallon of gas were the links between me and Finn and Kyra Kelley.
    If he was the guide in my life, she was the soundtrack. In my mind, we’d all three grown up together. I loved her from her very first album, and Finn did too, though eventually he stopped admitting it. She was sweet and earnest and wrote her own songs. Songs about getting her heart broken by boys who didn’t know she existed or who were in love with girls all wrong for them. She wrote my life, and I loved her for it.
    I followed in magazines her transformation from country girl to pop crossover, to graceful twenty-something singer-turned-model-turned-actress. I watched her get her heart broken some more and thought she deserved better. Someone good and solid like my brother, who would open doors for her and look out for her heart. The kind of guy who would surprise his little sister with an impossibly perfect gift and ask only one thing in return.
    Tell her about him.
    The thought grabbed at me, and I glanced over at Aunt Gina, who was still sleeping. Even when the chaplain had informed us that Finn’s services would need to be held the day before I was supposed to leave for school, she’d