Season of Change(124)

                Something glittered beneath Christine’s shoes. He moved them aside and sucked in a breath. Beneath the pile were the girls’ golden baby bracelets.

                They’d come in here. Alone. Before they left.

                Slade had to remind himself to breathe. He was incredibly lucky. His young daughters were so very brave. Even when their mother left them with him—practically a stranger, a man Evy had painted as unstable, dangerous—his little girls had been strong. They’d watched him. They’d been careful. They’d learned to love him.

                And he’d let them go.

                Knife blades couldn’t have driven more pain into his chest.

                He’d let his babies go.

                He’d let fear and guilt and shame win.

                Slade left the mementos on the floor and looked around the room, stopping at different items his parents had been fond of—the lilac afghan his mother had crocheted, the baseball his dad had caught from a homer at a Giants game, his grandmother’s small crystal bowl filled with quartz, his father’s smile as he held up a huge rainbow trout. There was love in this room.

                There were no ghosts. No demons. No shadows of his past.

                It was just a room where something terrible had happened.

                It had no hold on him anymore.

                No hold.

                Slade hurried out of the room, searching for his cell phone.

                * * *

                SLADE FOUND HIS friends later that afternoon on Flynn’s back porch. He heard their voices before he saw them and hesitated only a moment. These people had changed his life. He didn’t know how to thank them.

                It was time to try.

                He clutched a large cardboard box and ascended the porch steps.

                He rounded the corner of the wraparound porch to find his friends in their usual spots—Becca in Flynn’s lap on a chair, Will and Emma sitting close together on a bench, Nate leaning against the porch railing across from Will, and a new addition to their group—Christine. She leaned on the porch railing across from Flynn, much too close to Nate, who was not the right man for her.

                There were gasps and exclamations when they saw him.

                Slade walked into their midst, staking out a place against the railing between Nate and Christine.

                No one spoke. They all stared at him.

                Slade kept his head high. He wore khakis and a blue button-down without a tie. The shirt placket was open so that the sickle curve of his scar was clearly visible on his neck. He let them look their fill.

                Only Christine didn’t look. Her snub chilled him. Had she given up on him? Was he too late?

                It seemed like a school year before Flynn spoke. “What took you so long?”

                “I couldn’t find what I was looking for. And I had to track down my legal counsel.”

                “Lawyers are never around when you need them to be,” Will said. He and Flynn knew some of what Slade had done that day. They’d come up with a reason to assemble the rest of Slade’s friends for him.

                “I instructed my divorce lawyer to inform the judge of what Evy did—how she told the girls I was dangerous, not just to myself, but to them. I have a feeling they’ll be on the next plane out.”