given me the best gift I’ve ever received. You’ve given me peace.”
“Time’s up,” the guard says.
“Chris, I assume you’re having some kind of internal struggle. This new lady of yours … your mother tells me she’s lovely and she loves you. Is she worthy of your love, like my Abigail was?”
I swallow hard and nod.
“Good.” A guard comes to take him away. “Trust in that,” Jim says over his shoulder. “Don’t waste second chances.” He points up. “He might decide not to give you a third. Goodbye, son.”
I sit at the table long after the door shuts behind him. Then I wonder if I have enough time to do something before tonight’s gig. When I leave, I text Liam and tell him I’ll meet everyone in the city at eight.
Then I do what I should have done a long time ago.
Chapter Forty-one
Bria
I hear a knock. I open the front door and find Crew standing on Brett’s doorstep. He’s leaning against the porch rail with his hands shoved in his pockets. My heart flips over at the first sight of him in a week, but I take a step back, putting distance between us. My heart doesn’t know what my head does.
“Why are you here?”
“Why do you think, Bria?”
“Because you want me in the band.”
The look in his eyes weighs heavy upon me. “I do—we all do—but that’s not why I’m here.”
“Save your breath. I have to figure things out myself.” I try to shut the door.
He lunges forward and stops it with his shoe. “Please let me talk to you. I’m ready to tell you everything.”
A long, arduous sigh works itself out of me. “I appreciate that, but I’m not sure what that will accomplish. I understand you lost someone important to you. Maybe that explains why you are the way you are, but it doesn’t excuse it.”
“I know that, but there’s a lot you don’t know. I’m not making excuses for what I did or asking you to forgive me. But maybe talking about it is the first step to, I don’t know, maybe fixing it.”
Despite how much I want to lock him out, an equally strong force urges me to give him a chance. He wants to tell me everything. How can I turn him away when I know how hard this must be for him?
I step back and let him in. “Brett’s at work, and everyone else is across the street at Emma’s mom’s house.”
He motions vaguely. “Uh, where should we …?”
I go into the kitchen. “You want coffee?”
“Okay.”
The townhouse is eerily quiet as I make it. I can feel him watching me. A sick feeling twists my stomach, knowing I’m about to find out what happened to Abby. Do I even want to know? If she died in a car accident, there wouldn’t be all this cloak and dagger stuff, would there?
I pour us each a cup and sit across from him at the table.
He stares at the empty chair between us. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“How about at the beginning? Where did you meet?”
I sip my coffee as he tells me about band class and instantly being a couple. He touches his notebook when he tells me how he wrote songs for her, and she sang them, how she wanted to be a part of his band, but her parents wouldn’t allow it. By the time we finish our second cups, I feel like I know her, and I’m genuinely sad to hear what’s to come. Because I know there’s a lot. I can hear it in his hesitant voice. See it in the tension around his eyes. Sense it in the way he rubs his tattoo. What he tells me will wreck him in ways I can’t begin to imagine.
After a long silence, he says, “There was this guy she worked with at the fast food place.”
Dread forms a knot in my gut knowing this guy is the reason she’s no longer here.
“He …” —his eyes close, and he takes a shaky breath— “liked her. He requested they be put on the same shifts. He kept asking her out.” He rubs his jaw. “He was a lot older than we were.”
His phone rings, but he silences it and turns it over. “He got fired but he still came around. He’d order food and stay at the counter, trying to talk to her. Or he’d go to the drive-thru and hold up other cars. One day I was there when he came in.” He