Chapter Thirteen
CREW SCRAPED THE last bite of eggs off his plate Friday morning, listening to the noises that were becoming familiar. Chairs shifted, silverware clinked, and voices held the quiet respect of people who belonged there.
They might belong, but he didn’t.
Dare was doing everything he could to make that obvious.
He walked away every time Crew made an effort to speak to him and held on to Billie like he was her shield and Crew was a bomb that might detonate at any second.
Cowboy kept things professional, while Sasha and some of the others were cordial enough.
Wynnie had made an effort to ask how he was doing a few times, which he appreciated, but he still wasn’t sure that being there was going to help him make amends.
He was minutes away from his first session with Colleen, and he hoped she might help him make sense of things.
He gathered his dishes and was halfway to the dish station when he felt the familiar bristle across his shoulders.
The one born from sleeping with one eye open and learning to have eyes in the back of his head.
The sensation of a storm moving purposefully toward him.
He looked over his shoulder as Cowboy cut through the room like a man with somewhere to be and no patience for detours, his eyes trained on Crew.
Crew turned to face him head-on, his pulse ratcheting up.
“The tractor’s back together, running clean,” Cowboy said angrily. “You know anything about that?”
“I noticed you were overloaded the last few days.” Crew squared his shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Figured I’d make myself useful.”
Cowboy’s jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing. “You don’t touch the equipment without clearing it with me first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you’d screwed it up, we’d be in a shitload of trouble.”
Crew was tempted to say he wouldn’t have laid a finger on it if he hadn’t known he could fix it. Instead, he said, “Understood. It won’t happen again.”
Cowboy stared at him, jaw tight. Then he muttered something under his breath that sounded like a curse and stepped past Crew, heading for the buffet.
Exhaling slowly, Crew put his dishes in the bin. When he turned around, he saw Tiny standing a few feet away, coffee mug in hand, watching him with that unreadable, granitelike expression.
Crew didn’t look away. He didn’t nod or smile. He just kept moving toward Colleen’s office and whatever reckoning was coming for him next.
“CREW, IT’S NICE to see you again,” Colleen said, motioning to the couch. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“Thanks.” Crew’s nerves kicked up. He’d expected to sit across the desk from her.
Colleen sat in an armchair.
Without the barrier of the desk, he felt exposed.
The couch was too comfortable, meant for people to sink into and forget they were there to spill their guts.
He moved to the edge of it, his boots flat on the floor.
Uncomfortably aware of the stiffness in his spine, he clasped his hands in his lap.
That felt too formal, so he unclasped them.
Colleen didn’t rush to fill the silence, and somehow that made it worse, because he knew whatever he said would take up that space.
She finally broke the silence, asking, “How are you settling in?”
He shifted on the couch, unsure how to measure settling in with the tightness in his chest and the mess of shit in his head. “All right.”
“Is that a good feeling for you, being all right?” she asked with a tilt of her head.
Nothing had felt good since his time with Trouble at the cabin, and he’d managed to fuck that up, too. “It’s a different feeling,” he said honestly.
“Different from what you were used to in prison, or in your life before that?”
His life before that tragic night had been solid.
Or so he’d thought. Prison had been a culture shock and a wake-up call, allowing the gravity of what he’d done to sink into his bones.
But coming out of prison? That was the real proving ground, showing him just how fucking privileged he’d been and all the things he’d taken for granted.
Like the way people used to see him as trustworthy.
Now they looked at him like they’d already decided he was a bad guy before he even opened his mouth.
Rubbing a knot at the back of his neck, he said, “Different from all of it.”
“How so?” she asked gently.
He thought about that for a minute. “The margin for error disappeared.”
“What does that mean? What margin for error?”
“Before prison, if I made a mistake, I could try to fix it. Do better the next time.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.
His father’s voice cut into his thoughts.
Sit up straight. Look people in the eye.
Fighting against that advice simply because of the person who had delivered it, he covered his fist with his other hand.
“Inside…in prison, you learn to measure everything you do before letting it out, because you don’t get second chances for being wrong. ”
“And now that you’re out?”
He met her gaze. “It feels like the rules followed me.”
“Which rules are those?”
“That everything has repercussions,” he said frustratedly. “One bad decision cancels out all the rest.”
“That’s a hard feeling to manage,” she said empathetically.
He’d expected her to deny that fact, not understand it. “It’s a rough reality.”
She nodded, her brow furrowing. “I can see how it would be. How do you feel about being here?”
“I didn’t come here looking to stay.”
“I know,” she says.
“I came to apologize. To face what I did, and suddenly I was being offered help and a place to stay, and free meals.”
“How does that feel?”
“Like I’m taking something I didn’t earn,” he says bluntly.
Colleen smiled thoughtfully. “That makes sense. In prison, you were living in a system in which everything was earned. What if being here isn’t about what you earned but what you deserve?”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not exactly,” she says simply. “What you earn is transactional. What you deserve is moral.”
“Don’t they go hand in hand?”
“Probably not in the way you think. Deserving relates to a person’s character, while earning is the result of an action.
For example, you can deserve recognition because you’re a good person, whereas you might earn a reward for the effort you put forth.
And, of course, it goes both ways. If you’re inherently mean or of poor character, or you don’t put effort in when it’s expected, you might be worthy of negative recognition or a demerit. Does that make sense?”
He tried to separate the two in his head, but they still felt intertwined. Exhaling with frustration, he shook his head and said, “I don’t know.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “That’s something we can work on.”
“I don’t want to be let off the hook for what I did,” he said adamantly.
“I respect that. Taking responsibility is important. But so is understanding that good people can do bad things, and a person can be fully responsible for something they’ve done and still be worthy of being here and being respected.”
She paused just long enough for him to silently process that.
As if she’d heard his thoughts, she said, “Being here doesn’t mean you’re forgiven. It means you’re not willing to hide, or erase yourself, to prove you understand the hurt you’ve caused.”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” he gritted out, holding his fist tighter. “I’ll never forgive myself, regardless of what anyone else thinks.”
“Maybe we can work on that, too. I have an idea that might help you with settling in here. Would you like to hear it?”
It couldn’t hurt. “Yes.”
“Instead of thinking about being here as something you need to deserve or earn, maybe you can try thinking about it as an avenue toward healing and figuring out how to do the least harm moving forward, to others and to yourself.”
That suggestion, and the distinction, should probably bring a modicum of relief, but it didn’t.
She was giving him a choice, throwing a lifeline into the gully of guilt he’d been drowning in for so long, the guilt had seeped into every iota of his being and become a part of him he wasn’t sure he’d be able to live without, much less know how to.
And that was terrifying.