The quiet inside those walls had started to press in on me. Too much history packed into too few rooms. Every surface felt like it held something I’d failed to protect.
I told myself I was just going for a drive. Five minutes. Ten. Enough to clear my head.
But the farther I got, the less I wanted to turn back.
The town unfolded around me in pieces I hadn’t meant to revisit. Streets I could drive without thinking. Turns my hands remembered even when my mind didn’t want to. It felt easier to keep moving than to decide where I was supposed to land.
So, I drove.
I drove without direction, through streets I knew like old scars, past houses I used to cut across with Matt, past corners where Claire and I had kissed, argued, laughed until we were breathless.
Every turn tugged at a painful memory. Eventually, I ended up at Miller’s Diner.
The bell over the door chimed, and the smell of coffee and frying bacon wrapped around me like an old blanket that didn’t quite fit anymore. A few heads lifted, recognition, curiosity, judgment.
I chose a booth in the far corner and ordered a black coffee, hoping for an uneventful day.
No such luck.
At the counter, old Joe Sanders leaned toward two other men and whispered far too loudly to be accidental.
“Shameful, ain’t it? Leavin’ your family like that. Boy broke his mama’s heart. And Claire’s too. Poor girl held her head up high, but she was gutted.”
The other man sighed. “She didn’t deserve the humiliation.”
“None of ’em did.”
I closed my eyes. The words sank deep, into places already tender.
I had expected judgment, hell, I deserved judgment, but hearing it so plainly made something in me collapse inward. Shame pooled hot and corrosive in my stomach.
The booth creaked. Sheriff June slid in across from me, setting her hat down with a soft thump.
“Pay them no mind,” she said simply.
I exhaled. “Sure.”
June snorted. “This town hears a mouse sneeze and holds a committee meeting about it.”
Despite myself I huffed a laugh.
Her eyes softened. “They’re not wrong, though.”
“No,” I admitted. “They’re not.”
“Ethan.” Her voice was lower now, almost kind. “You can’t fix what you broke by praying.”
I looked down at my coffee. “I don’t know if Claire even wants to hear from me.”
“Maybe she doesn’t,” June said. “Not yet. Maybe never. But wanting to fix something and doing the work to fix it, are two different animals.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “I owe her an apology.”
“You owe yourself one too.”
I shook my head. “She paid for something I did. She suffered for my choices. And she still is.”
June leaned back. “Then change the story. Make this the chapter where you finally do right.”
