Page 35 of Weight of Guilt

His mind circled back to Voss. His name still lingered ten years later. The investigators for the case had probably carried his name a long time without ever closing the file on it.

He knew something about that too. His own name had followed him out of Nashville the same way. He’d been cleared on paper, the review board’s report as clean as any he’d ever read. But that didn’t matter.

People had decided who he was. They were quick to make assumptions and slow to let them go, whether or not it had ever been true.

Maybe that was why he couldn’t leave Voss’s name alone either—not because he thought the man was innocent, and not because he thought he wasn’t. He didn’t know yet.

Mason broke from the huddle and sprinted for his mom, already narrating the play he’d just made to anyone who’d listen. Wren laughed at something he said.

Nash’s chest warmed at the sight of the two of them. Right now, Wren was unguarded in a way she hadn’t been on the bleachers. This was how she probably acted—or had acted—before the stress of today descended upon her.

He needed to nip in the bud the warmth he felt. It wouldn’t lead anywhere good.

But he’d already found himself checking her finger for a ring. She didn’t wear one.

However, he’d spent the last year proving to himself that he could bounce back after being written off by a woman who’d claimed to love him. Letting someone else in would only be a mistake.

His physical wound wasn’t the only wound still healing.

He was still watching them when a prickle hit low on the back of his neck.

Nash straightened on the bench and scanned the field.

Parents clustered near the fence, packing up chairs and coolers, calling kids toward the parking lot. A couple of teenagers cut across the far end, earbuds in, uninterested in any of it.

Nothing indicated where the feeling had come from. But he hadn’t imagined it.

He scanned the woods next, a dense stand of pines bordering the far side of the complex. Still nothing he could point to. No shape, no movement, no glint of anything catching the last of the light.

That didn’t loosen the tension across his shoulders.

He sat there a moment longer and scanned the field again—faces this time. He looked for anyone lingering too long. Anyone watching too carefully. Anyone standing apart from the ordinary current of parents and kids packing up for the night.

Nothing.

Down at the fence, Wren looked up and caught him watching. She gave him a small, uncertain smile and then waved goodbye.

Nash made himself smile back.

But he couldn’t help but think she was in danger. And he knew that, despite his reservations, he would fight with everything inside him to protect both Wren and her son.

Chapter

Seventeen

I watch as the boy runs to his mother.

He talks with his whole body when he’s proud of himself. I’ve watched enough of his practices to know it’s about a kick. His mother laughs at nearly everything he says, the sound open and unguarded.

I keep to the woods, where the pines grow close enough that the evening light never quite reaches the ground beneath them. Standing here, I’m just another shadow among shadows.

I watch this boy and let myself want the thing I’ve been circling for days now.

Not yet, I remind myself. There’s a shape to this, a rhythm. Rushing it has never once served me well. Patience is the only real gift I have left to give myself.

The man on the bleachers straightens.

I go still. He’s turned and is scanning the field with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who’s done this before. The man studies the parents packing up their chairs, the emptying field, the woods.