Pete keeps making me say the same sentence. Danny chose. He stepped in front of that bullet himself. I trained him but I didn’t put him in that path — he put himself there. We’ve been over it every session for weeks. Today I wrote it down without flinching. Maybe that’s progress. Maybe it’s nothing.
I looked up from my journal to find Colt standing in the doorway of my room. He was leaning against the frame, arms crossed. Looked like he’d been there a minute already, watching without announcing himself. Not the VP face he wore in church. The other one.
“Something’s different,” he said. He pushed off the doorframe and walked in, settling into the chair by my desk.
“Pete’s helping. The journaling. The Tuesday group. Talking through it instead of drowning in it.”
“And the guilt?”
I closed the journal and set it aside. “Still there. Probably always will be. But I’m learning to carry it instead of letting it carry me.”
Colt nodded slowly. “That’s how it works. You don’t get over the hard things. You just learn to live with them.”
“I have to. Not just for Bea. For Danny. For myself.”
“The waiting’s over, at least.”
“The waiting?”
“The part where you thought the revelation would fix it.” He shrugged, not unkind. “We could all see it. You were holding on—waiting for the truth to come out, like once Bea knew you hadn’t cheated, that would be the thing that opened the door.”
I wanted to argue. But he was right. For weeks I’d been going through the motions while part of me held the revelation like a key — like once I turned it everything would unlock.
It hadn’t. Because it was the wrong key to the wrong door.
“I’m not doing it for her anymore,” I said. “I mean, I hope—” I stopped, shook my head. “It doesn’t matter what I hope. What matters is that I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Because I need to be a better man, whether we get back together or not.”
Colt studied me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, decisively.
“Good. That’s the only way it works.” He stood. “Keep doing the work. She’s watching, even if she’s not saying so.”
His hand came down on my shoulder and stayed a moment longer than it needed to. He’d been in this exact place. Knew what it felt like to stand in it. I didn’t look up and he didn’t need me to.
He left, and I sat alone with my journal and my thoughts. I opened the journal to a fresh page. Before I had a chance to write anything, there was a knock.
Glitch.
“She’s doing okay, brother. Nothing to flag.”
I nodded.
“She doesn’t know,” Glitch said. Not reassurance — just confirmation. He walked off.
I wasn’t doing this to get her back. I knew that now, clearly. I was doing it because I’d stood in her hallway and told her to check before she opened the door — and because I knew she didn’t always do it, and because somebody needed to be close enough to help her if she needed it. That was all.
I looked back at the journal. The page was still blank.
Chapter 28
?
— Bea —
Ididn’t expect to see him there.
The grief support group met every Tuesday evening at the community center on Maple Street. It was Gillian’s group — a licensed counselor who’d been running it for years. Jessica, one of my graduate students, was placed there as part of her practicum: sitting in, observing, learning what it looked like before she was ever handed the room. That kind of training placement came with its own supervisor — someone whose job was to watch Jessica while Gillian’s focus stayed on the group. That someone was a colleague of mine, currently at a conference in Portland through the end of the week. I was stepping in for her tonight.
I’d been briefed on the group beforehand. Small. Ten regulars dealing with various losses. A widow. A father who’d lost his daughter to cancer. A woman processing the death of her sister. A handful of others. Others who popped in whenever they felt the need. Normal grief work. Safe. Predictable. I’d told Jessica I’d be there ten minutes early to get oriented, take my place in the back, and otherwise stay out of her way.
