Garrett’s mood had never matched his nickname as much as it did on Sunday. It had been three days since Paige walked out on him. At first he hadn’t cared; he just assumed she would cool off and come back. By the following evening when he hadn’t heard from her, he started calling. She didn’t answer his calls and she didn’t return his text messages. He drove to her house, but she wouldn’t answer the door. He thought about breaking it down, but he wasn’t quite at that level of crazy...yet. Instead he went for a ride on the Harley and when that didn’t calm him down, he went to a bar. He sat belly up, drinking beer and shots of whiskey and watching the TV hung on the wall above the bottles of liquor. He wasn’t sure if he was depressed, or angry, but when the news accounts turned to Benjamin Ewell’s murder and they began interviewing people who claimed he was a “stellar person,” there was no longer any question about what he was feeling. He was pissed.

He was pissed that his best friend was sitting in jail, facing a murder charge for a murder Garrett had committed. He was pissed at Paige for walking out and pissed at himself for letting her. He was pissed at Vivian for looking at him after Beau died like it was killing her that he was the one alive. He was pissed at his mother for dying and his father for not being the least bit nurturing. He was pissed that he never learned how to have a relationship of any kind...and now when he needed someone, he had no fucking clue how to connect. Most of all he was pissed that he was still alive, and he decided that no matter how much of a guilt trip Leanne had laid on him, Jessie deserved so much better than him. As soon as he took care of this shit with Saint, he was checking out, for good.

He drank himself into a stupor that night, and the bartender had to pour him into a cab. He had to have one of the prospects go get his bike on Saturday because he had a fucking migraine so bad that he couldn’t get out of bed...and when Sunday finally rolled around, the only way he could force himself to get out of bed, shower, and dress was the promise that he’d made. He was going to talk to Saint and clear this mess up, and then all of this would be over. He wouldn’t have to feel anything any longer.

He sat now in the waiting room of the jail while they brought Saint out into the visiting room. He’d been there for twenty minutes already, and he was almost at his boiling point and at risk of getting arrested himself when the correctional officer finally said:

“Visitor for Barrett!” Garrett hadn’t heard Saint’s given name in years before he read it on that file Darwin had at the clubhouse. It sounded strange and false to his ears and took him a few seconds to register that it was Saint.

“That’s me,” Garrett said, standing up. The bailiff looked him over, cocking an eyebrow slightly as he did. He rested his hand over the can of OC spray tucked in his belt and said:

“Follow me.” Garrett waited for him to turn his back before rolling his eyes. The little man was afraid that he was going to make trouble. Little did he know that wasn’t Garrett’s style. As big as he was, if he wanted you dead, you’d never see him coming.

The officer led him into a big room where there were banks of telephones all facing a glass barrier. On the other side of the glass were more phones, and the partitions were divided by about three inches of Formica on either side. He saw Saint sitting inside the third partition on the other side of the glass. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. His normally styled hair was hanging limp around his face and he had stubble...something Garrett had never seen before. His eyes were bloodshot and one of them blackened all around the underside and across the lid. Despite all of that, and his situation, he grinned when he saw Garrett. Garrett didn’t smile back.

He walked over and sat down across from him. The C.O. said, “Fifteen minutes,” before he walked away. Saint was already holding the phone in his hand. Garrett picked his up and Saint said, “Hey, Bear, how goes it?”

“How goes it? Fuck, Saint...you tell me. What the hell are you doing in here?”

“Well, first I got stopped for driving erratically...”

“Don’t bullshit me. You can bullshit everyone else, but not me. You absorb alcohol like a fucking lizard absorbs the sun. You never get drunk to the point of driving erratically, and Paige said you only had a splash of vodka in your tea. So, try again.”

He was still grinning. “You didn’t let me finish. I was driving erratically, on purpose. I wanted to get caught.”

“Why? Make me understand what you’re doing in here.”

“Protecting my brother,” he said.

“Fuck that. I didn’t need your protection, Saint. I didn’t ask for it.”

“Fuck yeah, you did. You were begging for someone’s help...you just never said it out loud so none of us knew. You never let us know, did you, Bear? You’ve been hurting inside for so long and you never talked to anyone about it.”

“I didn’t need to talk about it...”

Saint smiled again. “I read that letter you left me, Bear, and I knew right away what I had to do.”

“By that you mean taking responsibility for something you didn’t do?”

“By that I mean having my brother’s back. I wanted to show you that all this time you haven’t been alone. You have people who love you, people who would do anything for you, people who would never want to see you die.”

“I know that, okay? Now tell them you didn’t do this and let’s work on getting you out of here.”

Saint shook his head. “You don’t know, Garrett. You think you’re all alone. You think you’ve been alone your entire life. You think there’s some kind of monster living in you and that we’d all be better off if you were both dead.”

“I thought that, okay? For a second, I thought that. I’m over it.”

Saint chuckled. “Bullshit. You never stop thinking. Those wheels in your head never stop turning...planning. Paige stopped you somehow from going through with it this time, but you’ll start planning it again. You’ll convince yourself that she’d be better off without you too, if you haven’t already done that.” Garrett shivered. It was exactly what he told himself when Paige walked out. Saint wasn’t a fucking mind reader, though, he was just guessing. None of that mattered anyways. All that mattered was getting him out of here.

“Fine, you want me to admit that I feel alone, okay...I do. Satisfied? Now stop being an idiot.”

Laughing again Saint said, “You’re my best friend, Garrett. I’m sure you’d do the same for me if the tables were turned.” Garrett was sure that he wouldn’t. The idea of being in jail made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. He did time as a youngster for drugs and alcohol, and once for shoplifting. He was never inside for more than a day or two, but that was bad enough. Saint had lost his mind.

“The point here is that you didn’t need to do this. I mean, I just don’t know what the fuck you were thinking. They would have never found anything that pointed to me...”

“Shh...they’re listening.”

“I don’t give a fuck! I’m going to turn myself in when I leave here if you don’t tell me you’re recanting this bullshit today.”

“I’m not recanting. I made my confession. Darwin wants me to plead not guilty, but I’m not doing that either.”

He was so calm, and talking as if this was some kind of rational decision. Garrett wanted to throttle him. He felt his blood boiling, so he changed the subject for a second one, hoping to cool down on the other. “You sent out the letters. Leanne got Jessie’s and she was pissed.”

“Don’t blame her. I’d be pissed too if the father of my kid was planning on offing himself for no good reason.”

“You don’t know what my reasons are, and you had no fucking business going through my saddlebags and sending out those letters. So far Leanne is the only one I’ve had to deal with but I’m waiting for the other calls.”

“Like from your Pops? That old man sitting in a nursing home that you never go and visit?”

“Don’t...”

“You don’t go see him because you’re ashamed of what you do. He was a war hero and the only man you ever looked up to...and you’re afraid that he’s going to be ashamed of you, of what you’ve done with your life. So you just don’t go see him.”

“You have a psych degree all of a sudden?”

“Nope, but I read his letter before I mailed it.”

“Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He ignored the question and said, “Did you ever tell him to his face how grateful you were for him taking you in at fifteen? Or how much you appreciated him letting you decide between the service and college? Or how proud you felt every time you looked at all of his medals from his service? Did you ever look him in the eyes and tell him all of that, or did you think a deathbed confession was good enough?” Garrett didn’t answer him, and he said, “I didn’t think so. Let’s talk about the letter you sent to a guy named Ivan...”

“No, let’s not.” Garrett gritted his teeth. He was shocked and appalled that Saint had read his letters. He’d been in some form of disbelief over his mailing them out, but he wouldn’t have suspected in a million years that he would read them first. Saint wasn’t fazed at all by Garrett’s bad mood or his protestations. He kept talking:

“Ivan’s serving time at a penitentiary in Massachusetts now, did you know that? I had to do some research to find him. I only looked there because it was pretty obvious what a shit he was his whole life. When he was arrested, he was in charge of a pretty lucrative prostitution ring; problem was he was using underage girls, and boys. An MC that goes by the Southside Skulls was pretty instrumental in shutting them down. Your friend Dax is the president of that club, isn’t he?” Garrett still stayed silent. “Seems like a lot of people in Ivan’s organization went missing before the police caught up with them. Ivan might have gone missing himself if he hadn’t rolled himself into the police station and turned himself in.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Garrett’s head was pounding again. He felt like he was in an alternate universe, some weird version of This Is Your Life.

Saint ignored that question too and went on, “I say ‘rolled’ because Ivan is a paraplegic. He has been since he was nineteen and shot in the back in a drive-by in front of his house. That case was never solved, but you might not know that, since it was almost exactly at the same time that you left Connecticut and came out west.”

“Leave it alone, Saint.”

“You talked about a kid named Beau in the letter to Ivan. You had some pretty nice things to say about him. You talked about Beau in my letter too...and in your stepmother’s...”

“Enough!”

“You said a lot of nice things about him. He had a good heart, an innocent soul, he was special needs, but that only made him want to work harder to be ‘normal’ like you...”

“Stop!”

“I know you feel bad for not saying those nice things to him when he was alive, Bear, but you were just a kid too. The beauty of it is, you can learn from it and do things differently now. You don’t just get one chance, Garrett...you can change any time you want to. You can’t go back and change what happened to Beau...”

Garrett stood up and dropped the phone. He glared down at Saint through the glass while it dangled in front of him. Saint stayed where he was, and his demeanor didn’t change at all. Garrett was primed to storm out, but morbid curiosity got the best of him. He picked the phone back up and sat down.

“Tell me what the point of all of this is, or I walk out of here and straight to the lead detective on Ewell’s case.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Saint said, still cool and calm. “You have an alibi, I don’t. My fingerprints were on your rifle, yours weren’t. That car you were driving that night is on three cameras in downtown Vegas. The driver is unrecognizable...all dressed in black. But I forgot to tell you that a few months back Monkey asked me to register a few of the cars; he had too many in his name. That one is in mine.”

“Why, Saint? Fucking please tell me why? What is your point here? What is the fucking endgame?”

He finally changed his expression, and it was one of pain. “My life was fucked up, right up until the day I met you. I spent years writing you letters and pouring out my heart and soul into them. You knew everything about me...well, almost everything. The only thing I never told you was that I took my first drink at ten years old. It was the only way, man...it was the only thing back then that got me through the day. I made a career out of figuring out who to steal it from and how. You’d be surprised at how trusting people were when they knew you were the preacher’s son. You know how that goes, though—after a while, I couldn’t live without it.”

“Shit, man, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Saint raised an eyebrow and smiled. “It was the only thing you didn’t know, Bear. The only thing I never told you. I told you things that to this day no one else knows, except for those monsters that masqueraded as my parents. You were the only other one that ever heard about the closet where my old man would pour the rice and make me kneel on it in my shorts and pray for hours. You were the only one who knew how my mother scrubbed me until I bled the day she caught me masturbating in my room...you were the only person on this earth who truly knew me, and you accepted me without question. You may not have known that I needed the alcohol to keep from having withdrawals that would kill me, but you knew I drank it daily, and in copious amounts.”

“Is that why you did this?” Garrett asked, confused. He wasn’t sure why they were talking about Saint’s alcoholism now...

He smiled again and said, “The thing is, despite the fact that you took me in, so to speak, I honestly never knew how you felt about me until I read that letter. I mean, I knew you had my back and I knew you liked me better than a lot of the guys. But after I read that letter, I was pretty devastated to think I might have died without ever knowing about Beau, and the fact that I reminded you so much of him. I never knew that you felt closer to me than you would have if we were blood. I was so touched to read it, right up until I got to the part where you were going to kill yourself. Then, honestly, I was a little pissed. You finally say all that to me and you weren’t going to give me a chance to tell you how it made me feel, or how much I appreciated you.”

“That’s not what the letters were for.”

“No, I know. The letters were to say all the things that you should have said to the people you cared about, but were afraid to. You were afraid that if you said those things out loud, you’d lose them. You lost your mother at nine, your little brother at twelve, along with your chance to have another mother love you. Then you lost your dad at fifteen. You’re so used to losing people that you don’t know how to keep them. You don’t know how to nurture a relationship. Losing people was all you knew about life by the time you were an adult.”

“Saint, we’re wasting time here...”

“Wasting time? No, Bear. Going through life not making connections, the way you and I both have, that’s wasting time. People like me have an inkling that you care about them. But if you never hear the words and you never have a chance to say them back because you know it makes that person uncomfortable...then it’s hard to believe them. It pisses me off, brother, that you expected us all to know these things just as we stood over your coffin. What the fuck were we supposed to do with our feelings at that point? Did you think about that?”

“I’m sorry, man,” Garrett said, wishing he could get Saint back on topic. “I was suicidal, so obviously not thinking so clearly.”

Saint chuckled. “Brother, suicidal is your lifestyle. I’m not judging you, it’s been mine too. I’m just trying to take some of that shit out of the bag you carry around, so life won’t be so heavy, and you might be able to learn how to enjoy it.”

Garrett’s head was beginning to ache again. He was so fucking confused. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “How is putting yourself in this situation helping either of us? I don’t fucking understand.”

“You think that you’ve lost everyone you cared about because you deserved it, because you’re a bad person and that if people knew the real you, they wouldn’t love you, and that God doesn’t love you. Man, if anyone knows God it’s me, and I’m here to tell you that he does not punish. He did not take those people from you because of something you did. Life is just fucked up sometimes. But what I learned way too late is that it just means you have to work harder to find the joy. I don’t want it to be too late for you. I know me being here doesn’t bring you any joy...at least not right now. But when you’re feeling down on yourself in the future and you start thinking you don’t deserve good things, I want you to remember me and remember that I loved you so much, brother, that doing this was the only way I could think of to prove that to you.”

He isn’t making sense. Maybe he got hold of some bad weed. “You’ve got nothing to prove to me, Saint.”

Saint kept talking like he didn’t hear him. “You don’t have a monster living in you, Bear. You’re a man with faults who has had too much shit happen to him too young. You were given to the Navy as a blank fucking slate and they made a killer out of you because that’s what they needed you to be. Monkey and the rest of this club have nurtured that part of you because that’s what they needed you to be. This Ewell guy was no punk dealer that crossed the club. He wasn’t in a rival gang, or a street gang. He wasn’t a pimp, and he wasn’t trafficking little girls. Yes, he was a fucking rapist and he needed to die...but he was a rich motherfucker who was living a double life, and the people who didn’t know the other side of him are not going to rest until the police have someone in custody. That’s where I come in.”

“So that’s why you’re sitting in jail, waiting to go to prison? This is to prove to me that I’m such a great guy, you’ll do anything for me?”

Saint nodded, which only frustrated Garrett more. “If you want to sum it up, yes, that’s about right. I didn’t want you hunted down like a dog...on the run, or thinking you needed to kill yourself to keep them from putting you in prison.”

“That’s fucking noble of you, brother, but it was un-fucking-necessary! Do you hear me? You want me to know how you feel about me...you should have just fucking told me. Spending twenty fucking years in prison is just...extreme. Insane. No, Saint, I can’t let you do this.”

Calmly Saint said, “I won’t be there for twenty years, Bear.”

“Only on the off-chance Darwin gets you off. If you plead guilty, the mandatory sentence is twenty-five years...life if they prove intent...” Garrett researched things like that in every state he did a job in. It was morbid curiosity, but he had to know.

“I know,” he said, still calm and in a voice that said he was trying to calm Garrett down too. “But it doesn’t matter what they find me guilty of, Bear. My sentence has already been handed down. In about three months, maybe sooner, my liver is going to stop working completely, all of my organs are going to shut down, and I’m going to go home to Jesus. I’m going to stand at those pearly gates until they let me in and once I’m inside, I’m going to crack open a bottle of champagne and celebrate. I know I haven’t lived the best life. But no matter what has happened, I believe God still loves me. I hope that one day you’ll believe that about yourself too, because when it’s your time, I’d really like to see you again.”

Garrett could feel the blood drain out of his own face. He couldn’t find the words...any words. He was sitting there with his mouth open, staring at his best friend who had just told him with a smile that he was dying. He’d blocked out all of that stuff about God and heaven. His best friend was fucking dying, and in prison to boot. Garrett knew a guy in the Navy who died from cirrhosis. It was an ugly, painful death. Prison was only going to make that worse. Saint didn’t deserve to die that way. Garrett had to stop this. He had to get Saint out of there.

“Don’t do it, brother,” Saint said. “I can hear what you’re thinking and I’m begging you, don’t do it. Let me do this for you. Let me die with hope in my heart that you’re going to have a great life.”

The door opened to the right of Garrett and he heard a voice say, “Time’s up.” He was still grappling for something to say...some way to get through Saint’s hard head.

He turned his head toward the C.O. “Just another minute, please.”

“No, now.” the officer said. Garrett turned back toward Saint. He’d already put the phone down. He smiled at Garrett and flashed him a peace sign. Garrett put his hand on the glass and watched as his friend was shackled up and shuffled away. Even the monster inside of him felt like his heart was breaking.