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“Eventually, they got me out of there. Mel did, I guess. Their father might have killed me if they hadn’t. We were right in each other’s faces, shouting. They got me out, took me back to the hotel, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I lay awake, and at four in the morning I went to a convenience store and bought some lighter fluid, a couple bottles of vodka, a cheap T-shirt, and matches. I made Molotov cocktails on the lawn—a guy at church camp had told me how to make them once, if you can believe that—and I threw them through the window and set Ben’s dad’s house on fire.”
“Holy cow!” Katie said, breathless. “Did you kill him?”
“No, but I tried to. Ben found me before the police did. He took the heat.”
“What do you mean, he took the heat?”
“I mean he told them he’d done it. He confessed. They took him away in the car with the lights flashing, just like on TV. And I was just sitting there on the curb in Iowa City, watching the sun come up and realizing I’d just ruined his whole life.”
“He went to prison?”
“No, he ended up taking a plea bargain and doing some community service in exchange for the charges being dropped. But it didn’t matter. West Point wouldn’t take him with an arrest record.”
“He doesn’t have an arrest record.” She’d run a background check on Ben, and he’d come up clean.
“Huh. He certainly got arrested. Charged, booked, the whole shebang.”
“Maybe he had it expunged.”
A hollow laugh from Judah. “I imagine that’s the sort of thing Paul would have a hand in. Make it disappear. Poof.” He waggled his fingers. “Never happened. One of Paul’s many talents. I wrecked Ben’s future, and Paul erased it.”
“Why do you say you wrecked his future? He seems to have coped okay without you.”
“West Point was his Los Angeles. It was his life’s goal, and he gave it up for me.”
“Maybe he wanted to.”
Judah picked an ice cube out of his glass.
She put her hand on his arm. “Maybe he thought you were worth it.”
He sneered. “I went to visit him in jail, and I told him I loved him, which I’d never done before. And then I got on a bus with Paul, moved to L.A., went straight, and never called him again.”
Katie went to lean back, remembered too late she was on a stool, and fell on her ass.
Judah offered her his hand, hauling her to her feet.
“Elegant,” he said.
“Bite me.”
She took her seat again and found her drink. Finished it off and ordered two more.
As shocked as she was at Judah’s attempt to kill Ben’s father, Katie knew that it was his betrayal of Ben that he felt guilty about. And she knew only too well how it felt to be betrayed.
Did Levi feel this guilty for what he’d d
one to her? Would he ever? Those months she’d spent closing down Wild Ride, when she’d hardly been able to walk without kicking the rubble of their life together away from her feet, she’d hoped he did. She’d wanted guilt to be a curse that ate him alive for the rest of his life. But instead, she’d just been eating herself up, just as Judah wallowed in his own regrets instead of doing something about them.
It wasn’t right. She’d given Levi her future freely. He’d asked her to come with him, to share his dream, and she’d packed her bags and climbed into his truck and never once looked back on the road to Anchorage. Sure, the dream had gone sour. He’d disappointed her. But that was life, wasn’t it? You made mistakes. You did the best you could. And then, if you could manage it, you moved on.
But none of them had moved on—not her, not Judah, not Sean.
Patty delivered the new round and made herself scarce.
“You need to be forgiven,” Katie said.
“No shit.”
