Left to Die

Vanessa Allen and I were the envy of everyone who knew us—we were the perfect, loving couple. What none of them knew was that I was never anything more than a stand-in for my younger brother. One offhand complaint from him that he wasn't feeling well, and Vanessa would drop me the second my heart gave out. I begged her, in tears, to save me. All I got back was a cold, "Stop making a scene." Mom frowned and told me to be the bigger person, to stop pulling petty stunts out of jealousy. Dad looked at me like I disgusted him and said if I really wanted to die, I should just hurry up and do it. Even my elder brother, the one who'd doted on me since we were kids, turned on me. "Miles has bipolar disorder. You know that. Why can't you just let it go for once?" After that, I finally let go of any illusions I had about love or family. That was when they finally started to regret it—when they came to me in tears, begging for forgiveness. Chapter 1 "Vanessa, if you're so worried about Miles, why did you even marry me?" I was nearly screaming. "Every single time, you drop everything and run to him. Have you ever once thought about how that makes me feel? I'm your husband!" The outburst set my heart pounding painfully, tight and constricted, until I could barely breathe. I knew what that meant—my heart condition was flaring up again. The pain hit so hard that all the color drained from my face, and I sank helplessly to the floor, one hand pressed to my chest. Vanessa Allen and I had been together for seven years. She should have recognized the signs immediately—she was a well-regarded cardiologist, after all, someone with real expertise in heart conditions. But her mind was entirely consumed by her brother, and she mistook my collapse for some petty jealous act. She only gave my shoulder a careless pat, her voice edged with impatience. "Honey, please don't fake a heart attack just to scare me. Miles isn't feeling well. I can't just ignore that." I grabbed at her with trembling hands and begged her to help me. She just frowned, irritated, and pulled her hand free. "Stop it, honey. I'll come back and sit with you in a bit." She must have noticed how awful I looked, because her tone softened slightly. "You're the one I care about most, honey. But I'm a doctor, and Miles isn't well—I can't just look the other way. Besides, he's your brother. Don't overthink this. We've got a long, long life ahead of us to be together. There's no need to be jealous." Once she'd finished feeding me that syrupy reassurance, she turned and walked out without a second thought, leaving me gasping on the floor, my face bled of all color. What a joke this marriage was. She called me "honey" like she meant it, swore up and down that she cared. But every single time it came down to a choice between me and Miles Carell, I was the one she left behind. Even today, with my heart failing, she hadn't so much as noticed—too busy playing doctor for Miles's minor cold. 'Vanessa, we're finished. There's no "after" for us anymore.' The doorbell rang, sharp and urgent, and something in me lit up with a small, foolish hope. Maybe this time, she'd chosen me. I forced myself upright and opened the door, but it wasn't who I'd hoped for. Mom stood on the other side, frowning, already lecturing me before I could get a word in. "Tim, how can you be so selfish? I already told you, Miles isn't feeling well. What's the harm in letting Vanessa look after him for a while? Can't you be the bigger person for once? "I know Vanessa is your wife, not his. You two have your whole lives together—all I'm asking is a few hours. Is that really so much to ask?" She knew perfectly well that Vanessa was my wife, not Miles's. So why did she act like it was so obvious I should hand her over? I pressed a hand to my aching chest, my mouth curling into a bitter twist. "Mom, my heart's acting up right now. Even so, you still think Vanessa should be with Miles instead of me?" Something flickered behind her eyes—guilt, gone almost as fast as it appeared—before she forced her voice steady again. "Tim, stop pretending. You've been lying for attention since you were a kid, and you still haven't grown out of it. There's no way this is just a coincidence. You just don't want Vanessa spending time with Miles, so you're pulling this stunt." Every word cut into me like a blade, one slice after another. I'd always known she favored Miles, but I never imagined this was how little she actually thought of me. For a few seconds, crushed under the weight of it, I couldn't say anything at all. My elder brother, Robin Carell, arrived right behind her and mistook my silence for guilt—proof, in his mind, that he'd caught me in the act. He gave a cold laugh. "Mom, Vanessa's already with Miles. No point wasting time here. Tim is always like this, always trying to compete with Miles over everything. "Tim, I'm warning you. Miles's kind, he doesn't want to make a thing of this—but if I ever catch you bullying him again, we won't go easy on you." Bullying him. What a joke. I laughed until tears came to my eyes. "So what, refusing to hand my own wife over to Miles counts as bullying him now?" As for "kind" and "gentle"—I thought of the arrogant, taunting texts and photos he'd sent me, and wondered how those words could possibly apply to Miles. It wasn't as if I hadn't shown them the evidence. But when favoritism runs deep enough, there's no reasoning with it, no matter how much proof you put in front of someone. They'd look at Miles's tearful, wounded face and decide I must have faked the evidence myself, just to steal attention away from him. Just like now. Robin shot me a cold glance and spoke like he was delivering some kind of verdict. "Vanessa liked Miles first, you know. If Miles hadn't stepped aside, you never would have had a shot at marrying her. And now all we're asking is that she looks after him for a bit, and you're throwing a fit like this. Faking a heart attack on top of it? We're not buying it." Dad nodded along, looking at me like I disgusted him. "Tim, stop the act. If you really want to die that badly, go ahead and get it over with." After that little round of humiliation, the three of them rushed off to the hospital to see Miles. None of them spared me a second thought. None of them believed my heart condition was real. I laughed, bitter and hollow, and dialed 911 with shaking fingers. I had a family by blood, and a wife who supposedly loved me. But none of it made a difference—I was as alone as if I had no one at all. Every one of them belonged to Miles. Chapter 2 The next time I woke up in the hospital, I turned on my phone to a wall of messages too vile to look at twice. All of them were from Miles. Miles: [Tim, so what if I'm not really a Carell? Mom, Dad, Robin, even Vanessa—they all still love me best. You're the unwanted one around here, you bastard.] Miles: [Tim, your life is pathetic. Notice how every single time they have to choose, they choose to throw you away? If I were you, I'd have killed myself by now.] Miles: [Why'd you even bother coming back, Tim? All you're doing is humiliating yourself. You'd have made a perfectly good dog back at Briarwood Manor. You should spend the rest of your life under my heel, right where you belong. Every message dripped with the same arrogance and cruelty. I read through them with no expression at all, barely a flicker of feeling. I'd been getting messages like these for years. To Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa, Miles looked innocent and kind. In reality, he was a monster through and through. My years at Briarwood Manor held my darkest, bloodiest memories. I hadn't just been responsible for every chore in that house—feeding the pigs, cooking, cleaning—I'd endured endless abuse on top of it. My foster father drank, and whenever something didn't go his way, he took it out on me. Beer bottles shattered against my skull, glass shards tearing into flesh, sharp and merciless. A heavy stick came down on me again and again until bones cracked in more places than I could count. He'd laugh, wild-eyed and half out of his mind, calling me a worthless mutt not fit to live. The woman I was supposed to call my mother never once stopped him—she joined in instead, taking every year of resentment she'd built up toward her husband and turning it into fists and kicks aimed at me. She'd fashion whips out of barbed rattan and lash me until strips of flesh tore away with every crack, blood running freely. They treated me worse than they treated their dogs. On the rare good days, I got to sleep in the storage room and eat whatever scraps they left behind. On the bad days, I slept outside in the mud by the front door. When it stormed, I'd be soaked through in minutes, and a fever always followed. Some nights they gave me nothing at all, and when the hunger got bad enough, I ate straight from the slop bucket meant for the pigs—then threw it all back up every time. For twenty years, they were the closest thing I had to parents, and in all that time, they never once gave me a shred of warmth. All I got from them was abuse, pain, and an endless kind of darkness. My body still carried the damage. Years of emotional battering and never enough rest had left me with a heart condition that would follow me for the rest of my life. It was only later that I learned the truth: I wasn't even their real son. That was why they'd tortured me the way they had. Their actual child had stolen my entire life out from under me—while I was living through hell, he was living like a prince, adored by everyone around him. Even after Mom, Dad, and Robin learned who Miles really was, and learned exactly what my foster parents had done to me, their first instinct wasn't to comfort me. It was to beg me not to take it out on Miles. Because Miles was innocent, they said. Miles was gentle and pure at heart. Except the so-called innocent Miles had known exactly who he was almost from the start, and he'd spent years scheming with his birth parents on new ways to torment me, all in an effort to trap me at that house forever. After I came back to the Carell family, he put on a pitiful little act, dropping to his knees and begging me not to send him away, making himself look as small and wounded as possible so that Mom, Dad, and Robin would ache for him. But behind everyone's backs, he set trap after trap for me, sending me exactly the kind of vicious, arrogant messages sitting in my phone right now—calling me a bastard, telling me to hurry up and die. "Mr. Carell, the heart you've been waiting for turned out to be a match, and it just became available today. Your condition's gotten worse, so we really can't afford to put this off any longer. Whenever it's convenient, could you have a family member come in to sign the consent forms? We'll get the surgery scheduled from there." The nurse's gentle voice broke through my thoughts. Family. Such a familiar word, and yet it felt like something from a stranger's life. My lips parted, my voice coming out rough. "I don't have any family. Can I just sign for myself?" The nurse froze, clearly about to say something, when a clear, wounded voice cut in first. "Tim, how could you say something like that? Do you have any idea how much that would hurt Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa?" Miles looked like a parasite that had found its opening, smug satisfaction written all over his face. Sure enough, standing behind him were Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa. All of them stared at me, their expressions frozen, unreadable. Chapter 3 Miles crossed the room to me at a quick pace, tears shining in his eyes—and underneath them, nothing but provocation. "I know you're upset that Vanessa and Mom and Dad came to sit with me instead of you, but I was in so much pain earlier—I swear I didn't mean to steal them away from you. Tim, please don't be angry with me. It's all my fault. Don't blame them, okay?" The words were pure poison dressed up as sweetness, and they set the whole family's anger on me while stirring up nothing but sympathy for Miles. Dad's face darkened. "Miles, don't waste your breath explaining yourself to something this heartless. He's been spoiled rotten. If he won't treat us like his parents and his family, then as far as we're concerned, we don't have a son like him." Mom pressed her lips into a thin line, looking at me with nothing but disappointment. "Tim, I'm not asking you to be as kind and gentle as Miles. But you're a Carell. How can you be this petty, this selfish? Your foster parents clearly never taught you a thing." Robin was even less forgiving. "Tim, I honestly wish you'd never come back. Before, our family was happy. Peaceful. We never had this much conflict and fighting." Even Vanessa looked at me with open disapproval. "Tim, Miles is your brother. You can't shut him out like this. Hearing you talk like that hurts everyone. And after everything, Miles's still generous enough to defend you." They lined up against me, seamlessly, like they'd rehearsed it, and tore into me one after another—as if I were some unforgivable criminal instead of their family. Every cruel word carved another piece out of me, until my heart felt like it had a hole punched clean through it, cold air pouring in and never stopping. Miles never missed a chance to fan the flames. His voice cracked with practiced tears. "Mom, Dad, Robin, Vanessa—please, don't talk to him like that. I understand him. I'm probably just one too many people in this family." That was all it took to bring Mom to tears. "Sweetheart, don't say that—you're breaking my heart. After all these years, what difference is there between you and my own flesh and blood? How could you ever be one too many?" Dad cut in, firm and absolute. "Miles, don't torture yourself with thoughts like that. No matter what happens, you're part of this family. Nobody can change that." Robin shot me a venomous look. "Miles, you'll always be my brother. Do you really think all these years together mean less than blood? I know exactly what kind of person you are. Don't worry—I'll protect you." And my own wife, Vanessa, reached out to rub Miles's shoulder, offering him comfort. Watching that whole tender little scene play out, I couldn't help but laugh. Meeting their shocked, furious stares, I said, "I'm genuinely curious. I spent years out there suffering, and not one of you feels even a shred of guilt about it? You know exactly what my foster parents did to me, and now you're mocking me for how I turned out. "When my heart gave out, not one of you cared. Not one of you tried to save me—you were all too busy hovering around Miles. I've told you a hundred times what he's done to me, and every single time, you decide he's innocent and make excuses for him. You never once gave me the benefit of the doubt." Wound after wound had finally worn the sheen of tears from my eyes, leaving something calm and hollow in its place. "Fine. Then I have nothing left to say. Miles, you can have Mom, Dad, and Robin. Take them all. They never cared about me anyway." "And Vanessa—let's get a divorce. You've always loved Miles. There's no reason to force yourself to stay in this marriage. I'll set you both free." In that one moment, I let go of it all—family, love, every last thread of it. But instead of the satisfaction I'd expected to see on her face, Vanessa looked like she was falling apart. "I won't agree to a divorce!"