“No,” Keith said. “I’d be an idiot if I did. But I knew what our chief had said. I knew that Gretchen, who’s damn good at her job, had a funny feeling that this guy might be something different from our usual. And I was stuck in a car with him for hours, and he was ... understanding. Respectful. Dignified. Funny. I had the chance to form my own opinion.”
He took a swig of coffee and another bite of waffle. He must’ve been getting calmer, because this time he could almost taste it. It was pretty good.
“And then everything went sideways,” he said. “Long story. But I wound up in the hospital, and Gretchen wound up transporting the prisoner on her own ... and he turned out to be innocent. It was a frame-up start to finish. I thought I was so great about drawing the line between good and bad, that I was so good at knowing exactly what was right, but I’d been hauling around an innocent guy in cuffs and I’d never thought twice about it.”
“What happened to him?”
“Gretchen proved his innocence, and he wound up proving that she was a shifter after all, even though she’d always thought she was human. They’re mates. They’re still together.”
“I like a happy ending,” Iris said, her eyes warm. “Good for them. And what happened to the scared, in-over-his-head guy who made a bad but understandable mistake?”
Keith smiled. “You’re being way too easy on him.”
“This story taught me to go easy on people,” Iris said. “I thought that was part of the point.”
“Touché. Well, that guy realized he needed to be less of a jackass. And when the prisoner got reinstated as a Marshal and started his own shifter team, the reformed jackass actually went to work for him.”
Iris’s eyes widened. “That wasCooper?”
“Yep. Best guy you could ever hope to meet. And for some reason, after all that, he’s still willing to call me a friend. So is Gretchen.”
“It seems like a lot of people whose judgment you trust actually think you’re a pretty okay guy,” Iris said. “Better than pretty okay, even.”
She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, which instantly set Keith’s heart racing.
“A lot of people wouldn’t have even admitted they’d messed up,” Iris said. “They would have just shrugged it off: ‘Well, I couldn’t have known that.’ They definitely wouldn’t change or start caring more about treating people decently than putting them in their place.” She hesitated for a second and then added, “I don’t even know if the Council would say you made a mistake at all.”
He had thought of that before, and it had subtly rocked something inside him and changed how he thought about where he’d come from and what he’d absorbed from it.
“I don’t know if they would either. But I’m saying it. I know it.”
And it meant a lot to him that she did too, even if she took a nicer view of it than he did. She saw him, flaws and all, and she understood that those flawsmattered, that he really had messed up ... and she was still here, holding his hand.
“And you’ve come back from it,” Iris said. “I’m saying that, and I know it. Did you really think this was going to make me think less of you?”
“Yes,” Keith said frankly.
“Well, it doesn’t. And by the way, I haven’t had a chance to tell you this yet because I didn’t want to interrupt your story, but these waffles are incredible.”
He laughed. “I’m glad.”
“Stick yours in the microwave a second, since it’s definitely gone cold, and you’ll see what I mean.”
He grinned at her and got up, feeling lighter than he had in years. Some part of him really had believed that she’d turn away from him once she saw how tarnished he was—that if she was open-minded enough to see the good in him now, she’d still be horrified by the bad that was in him back then.
But she wasn’t. And she liked his waffles.
And she was right: once he’d zapped his for a minute, he could tell that it was delicious.
