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And the woman did look truly stunned at her thoughtlessness, Decker observed.
“Well, you just came out of a drug coma. You can’t be thinking too clearly.”
“You’re being too kind, Decker.” She hesitated. “But I get the feeling that’s about to change.”
He stood and looked down at her. “Do you know how many people go through life without a second chance to get it right?”
“I…what do you mean exactly?”
“You messed up, Mitzi. You helped frame your father. He suffered greatly for that. He went to prison, where terrible things happened to him.”
“I know all that. I was…I was out of my mind on drugs, Decker.”
“And now you’re not. You’re clean and sober and hopefully thinking clearly.”
“What do you want me to do?” she said warily.
“How about the right thing.”
“And what is that precisely?”
“You go into court and you make a statement, clearing your father, returning him his good name, and accepting responsibility for what you did.”
“And then I go to prison? That’s what you’re asking me to do, isn’t it?”
“Well, I think I have the right to ask, considering you did your best to blow my head off back at your house.”
“I…I can’t go to prison. My son will have nobody.”
“Maybe you won’t have to.”
“How?” she said pleadingly.
“This is not a typical case. I might be able to get the authorities to make a deal. You tell us what really happened, your father’s reputation is restored, and you go on with your life.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“Anything is possible. But aside from the obvious benefits to you, I think there might be something else positive in that scenario for you.”
“What?”
“You’ve been living all these years with guilt, Mitzi. Whether you know it or not. And that does something to you. It changes you. It makes you become someone maybe you don’t want to be but can do nothing to stop. Even with all the money in the world. It tears away at you little by little.”
She clutched at her sheet and glanced up at him. “You…you sound like that might have happened to you.”
“There was nomightabout it. I wasn’t there for my family when they needed me. Because of that, they died. I’m never going to see my wife and my daughter again, and I guess I’ve always accepted that as my penance.” Decker drew a long breath. “But that’s no way to live, Mitzi. Trust me.”
Tears were sliding down the woman’s cheeks. She reached out and clutched his hand. Not too long ago, Decker would have flinched from this contact.
Yet when Melvin Mars had put his arm around him when Decker had been at one of his lowest points here, and then Mary Lancaster had gripped his hand in the car, just wanting the comforting embrace of another human when she had felt so scared, something had happened to Amos Decker.
And it was a good thing. Because despite all the unsettling things that his mind had been doing while he was here, the ability to be hugged or have your hand clenched by another without flinching, that simple act, which just about everyone else took for granted, had brought Decker a bit closer to the person he had once been. Before he had died on a football field and woken up as someone else entirely.
So, Decker reached out his other hand and closed it over Mitzi’s.
“Will you do that, Mitzi? Will you take that step? Will you right the things you can? And finally free yourself of the guilt?”
An uncomfortably long moment passed until she spoke.
“Yes. I will.”
