playing nice with Brody Fucking McCallister. I’d do it for Lila and for Noah.
Maybe my mom had been right. I needed to find a way to forgive myself. And maybe if I could do that, I could find a way to forgive Brody for being there when I wasn’t.
Taking a deep breath, I opened the door and walked into The Roadhouse. Christmas lights were still strung up even though it was May, and country music still played from the speakers but the sound quality was better and the place didn’t smell like stale beer and cigarette smoke anymore.
“Well, if it isn’t Jude McCallister,” Colleen said with a smile. “Long time no see.”
She set a beer in front of me and grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the shelf. “I’m good with the beer.”
Her brows raised, but she nodded and returned the bottle to the shelf. “Where’ve you been all these years, sugar?”
“Everywhere and nowhere.” And that at least was an honest answer.
“Well, I guess that’s where you had to go to find your way back home,” she said, understanding more than I’d told her. “You look good. Real good.”
I tipped my chin. “Thanks. So do you.” She looked the same—long auburn hair, tight jeans, and a fitted black T-shirt with Johnny Cash’s face on it. “How have you been?”
She shrugged. “Can’t complain. I bought the place a few years back.” Shrewd blue eyes assessed me. “But I guess you know that, don’t you?”
“I might have heard something about it.”
With a shake of her head, she laughed. “You’re a lousy liar. I’ve been hanging on to this for years, waiting for you to come back.” She reached into a drawer under the bar and set a check in front of me. “I’m not gonna take your money, baby. You never owed me a thing.”
I looked down at the check she’d set in front of me. Guilt money. The same as the money I’d tried to give Lila when I left her. “I owed you the truth.” I remembered my mom’s words. That I had to find a way to forgive myself. And for the most part, I had but I still felt like I owed Colleen more than what I’d given her. Which was the reason I was sitting on this barstool right now. “That story you read in the newspaper. I didn’t save Reese’s life. That’s not how it happened. I—”
She held up her hand to stop me. “You were in a combat zone, baby. I’m not stupid. Bad things happen to good people all the time. I don’t need to know how Reese died. You were there for him. Do you know how many times he used to mention you in his emails to me? You were a good friend to him. And he was proud to be a Marine and serve his country and fight right alongside his best friend. So you have nothing to feel guilty about, you hear me?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I hear you.”
“Good. Now let it go. You can’t hang on to all of that. Just go out there and live the best life you can. That’s what Reese would have wanted. That’s the best way to honor his memory.”
With her words, a weight lifted off my shoulders.
“Now, what I wouldn’t mind hearing are some of the good stories about Reese.”
“Oh, I have plenty of them.” I laughed at some of my memories of Reese. I didn’t know if she’d want to hear about the time he finally lost his virginity to a stripper named Destiny and woke up the next morning with her name tattooed over his heart. But I had plenty of other stories I could share. And that’s what I did. I talked about Reese for two hours and I made Colleen laugh and I made her cry and when I left, she hugged me goodbye and thanked me for sharing my memories with her.
And I guess that’s all part of the healing process. You have to talk about the shit that’s eating away at you, unload some of the baggage you’ve been carting around for too long and lighten your load.
The night before Lila’s thirtieth birthday, I went to see Brody. He was sitting on his back porch, a beer in his hand, feet propped on the banister. When I made my presence known and joined him on the porch, he didn’t look surprised to see me.
Without waiting for an invitation, I took a seat on the wicker chair next to