CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Michael eyed his brother and in a nanosecond guessed what Colin had been up to. “You look like you just booked a room for a quick lay.”

“Whoa.” Colin held up his hands.

“Am I right or am I right?” Michael asked as he knocked back a beer at the blackjack table. Ryan had taken off with his bride-to-be, Shannon had hopped on the back of Brent’s bike and headed home with her husband, and the detective had gone off to do whatever detectives did. Solve cases, hopefully. Arrest bad guys. Deal with the shit on the streets.

“You’re wrong. Wish you were right,” Colin said. Michael’s youngest brother—wait, make that second-to-youngest-brother—settled in next to him for another round of cards as the clock ticked closer to midnight.

“What’s the story?”

Colin sighed. “It’s a long one.”

“Looks like you got all night, buddy,” Michael said, then pushed some chips into the center of the green felt. “Hit me,” he said to the dealer, who doled out another card.

“There was a girl. There was a guy. There was some trouble,” Colin said, summing it up.

Michael raised his beer and quirked up his lips. “Tell me about it.”

“What about you?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “You know me,” he said, keeping it vague because his romantic life was…well, it was just fine and fantastic, except for that little problem of Annalise.

“You’re still hung up on her, aren’t you?”

Michael scoffed, dismissing the idea that he was mooning over a girl. “Who?”

Colin cracked up and pointed at him. “That’s a good one. That’s the best. How long did you practice to make that ‘who’ sound convincing?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Michael said as the dealer laid down an eight of hearts. His hand busted. The house scooped up all the chips.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You should just look her up. Find her.”

“Yeah? That’s your advice? This from the guy who’s having his own woman trouble?”

Colin nodded vigorously. “You’ll always wonder ‘what if.’ Better to try than to keep asking. Better to find your what-if woman than to wonder if she’s asking the same questions.”

It must be obvious she’d been on his mind, even though he hadn’t seen her in years. Not since he’d bumped into her at the airport in France, and they’d had an hour together on a layover. He didn’t think he’d hear from her again, and then she’d reached out to him last week.

He pushed her out of his mind as his brother-in-law’s friend Mindy walked toward them—he’d invited the cute blonde to join him for cards. He wanted to talk to her about something he’d heard the other day when he’d visited his dad’s old friends. Something about trouble at his dad’s company from way back when, and some details he recalled his father sharing with him at the time. He wanted to see if it added up to anything. Plus, he liked spending time with Mindy. She was a straight shooter, and he liked that in a woman. Liked the way she looked, too, in that little skirt she wore. She waved when she spotted him, and he tipped his chin and patted the stool next to him.

“What about you? How are we going to get you out of the girl trouble you’re in?” he asked his brother before Mindy arrived.

Colin sighed heavily. “That is the million-dollar question, and I don’t know that I have the answer. About the only one who might is John Winston.”

Then Mindy joined them, giving him a quick hug, and doing the same for Colin. Time to set thoughts of other women aside.

* * *

When Colin woke up at dawn, the sun streaming through the open window in his house, he didn’t embark on his usual Saturday morning routine. The mountains called to him, but he ignored them. The lake wanted his company, but it would survive without him today. No gym, no workout, and no quiet contemplation.

There was one thing he had to do, so he lobbed a call to his youngest sibling and suggested a road trip.

Marcus was game. “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”

Colin suspected this was why Marcus had wanted to get to know his siblings. Not necessarily for a trip like this, but to be invited. To be included.

Two hours and one hundred miles later, they were drinking Slushees and arguing over whether rock music was better than hip-hop. Marcus kept trying to take control of the radio, tuning in to stations Colin didn’t want to listen to. Colin gave Marcus a hard time because that was in the how-to-be-a-brother handbook, and the hazing made the kid laugh.

At the next gas station, they added Doritos to the haul. Colin ripped open the bag. “I think this might make my system go into shock. It’s the first true junk food I’ve had in ages.”

Marcus scoffed. “Dude. You drink soda all the time. Your body’s not a temple twenty-four-seven.”

“Touché. I just can’t give up the hard stuff, I guess. Me and Diet Coke—we’re like this,” he said, twisting his index and middle finger together. “Diet Coke has gotten me through many moments of temptation.”

“Then you need to keep worshiping the almighty beverage,” he said.

They returned to his car and plowed through Doritos, Peanut M&Ms, and more Diet Coke as they drove.

By one p.m., they pulled into the lot at Hawthorne. Colin froze momentarily at the gate as he showed his ID. It was as if all his systems simply stopped functioning for a few seconds. Not because he was nervous. Not because he was scared.

He didn’t feel either of those emotions.

Instead, astonishment gripped him.

He was amazed that the woman who had given birth to him had lived eighteen years behind this fence, past that barbed wire, beyond the concrete walls.

Ryan had told him that today was a visiting day, but Dora Prince wasn’t expecting them. Colin wasn’t here for her, though, or for the investigation. He didn’t come to question her, or obtain evidence. He had nothing to ask her. That wasn’t his job. That wasn’t his role.

He was here for the healing.

As much as he’d tried to dismiss Elle’s suggestion, it had hovered at the front of his brain for the last week. To keep moving forward in his life, whether with Elle or without her, he had another step to take.

Recovery was a daily practice. It didn’t end. He would always be unfinished, but this was part of coming to peace with his unfinished self.

Before they entered the visiting room he turned to Marcus and said, “Bet you didn’t think you’d be here with me visiting our mom today, did you?”

Marcus shook his head. “Nope. But is it weird to say I’m glad we’re here?”

Colin managed a small smile. “It’s not. Let’s go see her.”

“Let’s do it,” Marcus echoed as they entered the cold, concrete visiting room.

A minute later, a woman in orange walked through the door, a corrections officer at her side.

Colin felt nothing and he felt everything.

She was the woman who’d raised him for thirteen years, and she was the woman he’d hated for eighteen years. She was the murderer and the mother. She was everything he never wanted to be, and then he’d become like her in ways he never wanted.

She was a prisoner, and she was a human being. One who still felt emotions, because oceans poured from her eyes, and they were tears of joy, as if all she’d ever wanted was to see her kids.

Despite all his efforts to remain stoic, a lump rose in his throat.

“My babies,” she said, crossing the distance in a nanosecond and wrapping her two youngest kids in the strangest hug Colin had ever experienced. That was no small feat for her to hug two men, considering both towered over her tiny frame. “My babies, my babies, my babies,” she sobbed.

She couldn’t stop weeping, or saying their names.

Eventually, the corrections officer made her let go. The front of Colin’s shirt was wet from her tears.

“Colin,” she said with a crazed kind of joy as she looked at him. Then, she shifted her gaze. “Marcus.”

“Hi,” Marcus said, and his voice seemed horribly dry as he added, “Mom.”

Colin couldn’t bring himself to call her that. But he had something else to say to her. He clapped Marcus on the shoulder and met his mother’s eyes.

“You don’t have to worry about Marcus anymore, because he has brothers and a sister who will look out for him. He has a good family on the outside. And I want you to know we’re going to do everything we can for him. He’s part of us.” He swallowed, and raised his chin up high, girding himself for the hardest part of the visit. For the reason he drove to the prison for the first time in years.

A piece of his heart had been metal, an alloy of shame and guilt. With words like a scalpel, he cut it from his body. “Because I’m a good man,” he said, letting go of the hate, letting it crumble to the ground. It couldn’t weigh him down any longer. “I had a good father, and you have good kids. All of them.”

Then, because it was the compassionate thing to do, he sat down with her and spent the next hour listening to her talk.

On the ride home, he and Marcus stopped for a burger, then John Winston called to give him the news he’d been waiting for.