34. Brady
brADY
The chicken breasts are still steaming when my phone rings.
I wipe my hands on a dish towel and glance at the screen, expecting Cruz or maybe Dakota asking about weekend plans. Instead, Emily’s name glows against the counter, and my stomach drops through the floor.
Four months since her last text. A generic happy birthday with a period at the end, no follow-up, no question about my life. Before that, almost a year of nothing. My sister doesn’t call to chat. My sister calls when the family has decided I need to hear from them.
I answer anyway. Because I’m an idiot. Because some stubborn kid inside me still remembers her letting me tag along to her basketball games, sneaking me candy when Dad said sugar was for children who behaved.
“Emily. Hey.”
“Brady.” Her voice is flat and tight, wound like a spring. “I need to talk to you about the gym.”
Not how are you. Not I miss you. Straight to business, the way Dad taught her.
“The gym,” I repeat.
“Deb Hutchins’s son found articles about you online. About where you’re training. That place in Virginia.” She pauses, and I can hear her choosing words like she’s picking up broken glass. “The one with the mission statement. About inclusivity. About welcoming people who—about that community.”
The meal prep containers sit open on my counter, lined up in neat rows. Six days of chicken and rice and roasted broccoli. My knife is still on the cutting board. I focus on these things because my chest has started to cave in.
“It’s an MMA gym, Emily. One of the best in the country.”
“It’s a gym for those people, Brady. It says it right on their website. Dad saw the screenshots. He saw the pictures of the owner and his—his fiancé.” The word comes out like it costs her. “You chose that place. Out of every gym in America, you chose to surround yourself with that.”
“Plenty of straight fighters train here. It’s inclusive, that’s all. It means nobody gets run out for being who they are. That’s the whole point.”
“That’s worse.” Her voice climbs. “Don’t you see how that’s worse? You’re not confused, you’re not struggling, you’re choosing it. You’re supporting it. You’re standing next to it and putting your name on it and everyone back home can see.”
“See what? Me training? Me winning fights?” I ask.
“Flaunting it.”
I lean against the counter and close my eyes. “I’m not flaunting anything. I go to practice. I fight. I come home and make chicken and rice like every other fighter in the sport.”
“Dad says—”
“I don’t care what Dad says.” It comes out sharp. “Sorry. I just. Emily, I haven’t spoken to Dad in two years. He made his position clear.”
“Because you refused to repent. Because you fight people, like it was something to announce, like it was news we were supposed to celebrate.” Her voice shakes now.
“Do you remember Deuteronomy? Do you remember Romans one? You memorized those verses, Brady. You stood in the living room and recited them.”
I remember. Thirteen years old, caught looking too long at Tyler Brooks during youth group, and Dad’s solution was scripture as punishment. Stand straight. Recite. Again. Again until the words meant nothing and everything.
“I remember being a kid who was terrified of his own father.”
“He was protecting you.”
“He was breaking me.”
Silence stretches between us, a thousand miles of it.
“I have children now,” she finally says. “Caleb is six. Ruthie is four. They ask about their uncle sometimes, and I have to decide what to tell them. I have a responsibility, Brady. I have to protect them from influences that would confuse them.”
“I’m not an influence. I’m your brother.”
“You’re a man who chose sin and built his whole life around it.
” The words come out rehearsed. Practiced in a mirror, maybe, or coached by Dad over Sunday dinner.
“Dad’s right. He’s been right this whole time.
Accepting it would’ve been enabling it. Sometimes tough love is the only love that works. ”
Something in me goes very quiet and very cold.
“Do you even care about me? Does being my sister mean anything, or did you trade it all in for a doctrine that lets you feel self-righteous about abandoning me?”
Her voice cracks. For one second, one heartbeat, my actual sister surfaces through the catechism.
“I love you. God knows I love you. But I love Him more, and His word is clear, and I can’t—” She stops, breathes, rebuilds the wall.
“I can’t condone your choices. I can’t maintain contact with someone who embraces sin and refuses to repent.
I’m praying for you. Maybe hitting bottom will bring you back to Christ. Maybe losing us is what it takes. ”
“Losing you.” I laugh. “Emily, I lost you years ago. You’re just making it official.”
“Don’t contact me. Don’t contact Aunt Carol or anyone. Dad’s made it clear. Anyone who keeps a relationship with you is choosing you over God, and that’s not a choice we’re willing to make.” A breath. “I hope someday you turn back. I really do.”
The line goes dead.
I stand in my kitchen holding the phone against my ear long after there’s nothing left to hear.
The chicken has stopped steaming. The rice cooker clicks over to warm.
Somewhere outside, a car door slams and a dog barks and the world keeps turning like my sister didn’t just close the last door my family left cracked open in my face.
My hands are shaking.
Here’s the thing that guts me: they’re not even rejecting me for the truth.
They don’t know about Dakota, about Cruz, about Dante, about Eli.
They don’t know I fell into something with four people that doesn’t have a name in any church bulletin.
They cut me off for proximity to the LGBTQ community.
For training at a gym that lets people exist. For standing near acceptance without even claiming it.
I slide down the cabinets until I’m sitting on my kitchen floor, and the dam I’ve been reinforcing since I was thirteen years old finally fails.
I cry like I haven’t cried since Dad looked at me across the dinner table and called me an abomination.
I cry for the sister who used to shield me from his belt and now can’t stand to hear my voice.
For Caleb and Ruthie, who will grow up with an uncle-shaped hole they’ll be taught not to ask about.
For the boy who spent a decade trying to be good enough, straight enough, quiet enough to earn back a love that was only ever offered with conditions and judgment.
My phone buzzes against the tile. A text from Dakota.
Dinner? I’m starving, and Cruz ate all my leftovers like a raccoon
I stare at the screen through blurred eyes. Type nothing. My thumbs won’t work and the tears won’t stop and I can’t figure out how to say my family just amputated me in a text.
Ten minutes later:
Brady, you okay?
I manage two words.
Not really
Her reply comes before I can set the phone down.
On my way
I’m fine. You don’t have to come. Seriously
She doesn’t answer. Which means she’s already driving.
Twenty minutes later, her knock hits my door, and when I open it, whatever’s on my face makes her breath hitch. She doesn’t ask a single question. Just steps inside, wraps her arms around me, and holds on while I fall apart against her shoulder for the second time in an hour.
“You’re okay,” she murmurs into my neck. “I’m here.”
She steers me to the couch without letting go, folds herself against my side, and waits.
Doesn’t push. Doesn’t fill the silence with noise or pepper me with questions.
Just breathes with me until my lungs remember how to work, and then the whole thing pours out of me.
Emily’s voice. Flaunting it. The niece and nephew I’ll never see grow up.
The finality of it, the door slamming shut so hard the frame cracked.
Dakota’s jaw goes tight as I talk. Her fingers stay gentle on my arm while her eyes burn.
“They cut you off,” she says, “because you train at a gym.”
“Because I train at this gym.”
“Because Victor built a place where people don’t have to lie.” She pulls out her phone.
“Dakota, don’t—”
“Too late.”
Thirty minutes later, my apartment is full.
Cruz arrives first with two grocery bags, kicking the door shut behind him like he owns the place.
Dante follows with that steady calm he carries into every crisis, squeezing my shoulder on his way past. Eli comes last, and the look on his face scares me a little—like he’s already mapped the route to my hometown and calculated exactly what he’d say to my father, and it’s taking real effort not to get in his truck.
Nobody makes it weird. Nobody makes it about anything except being here.
Cruz commandeers my stove. “I’m making my mama’s chicken and dumplings. Well. My version. Which is better.”
“Order pizza,” Dante tells me quietly, already pulling up the app. “As backup. His cooking’s a coin flip.”
“I heard that, and I’m choosing to rise above it.”
Eli sits down beside me on the couch and puts his hand on the back of my neck.
Just that warm weight that finds the exact spot where I hold the tension, and presses until my shoulders drop an inch.
Dakota stays curled into my other side, and I watch Cruz argue with my spice cabinet and Dante spread napkins on my coffee table like he’s done it a hundred times.
They came. All four of them. No questions, no conditions. I sent two words to one person, and my whole world showed up.
Dinner ends up being dumplings and pizza, because Cruz’s dumplings turn out dense enough to qualify as training equipment, and he defends them anyway between bites of pepperoni.
We eat crowded around my coffee table, too many people for the seating I own, and somewhere between the food and the dark outside the windows, the conversation shifts.