Chapter 31
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— Holden —
S ix months.
I woke up sober and present. Four months without a drink. If there was ever a day that would test that, it was this one. Right now, it was just me and the grief, facing each other in the dark of my room at five in the morning while the rest of the compound slept.
Pete had prepared me for this day. We’d talked about it in our sessions, developed strategies for coping with the waves that would come.
Journaling. Breathing exercises. Reaching out to brothers when I needed support.
I’d written the strategies on a card and put it in my wallet like a man who didn’t trust himself to remember his own name in a crisis, and Pete hadn’t said a word about it.
I got dressed. Made coffee. Drank it standing at the counter, watching the sky lighten through the kitchen window. The coffee was good. I noticed that it was good. Six months ago I couldn’t have told you what anything tasted like.
I drove to the flower shop on Main Street. “Yellow roses?” the woman behind the counter asked. She’d seen me enough times by now to know the order.
“Two bunches today.”
She wrapped them carefully and I drove the truck across town to the cemetery.
Danny’s grave was on the east side, under a young oak that wouldn’t give proper shade for another decade. The headstone was simple — black granite, white letters. The dates underneath, nineteen years apart, that looked wrong no matter how many times I read them. Nineteen years wasn’t enough.
I set the yellow roses against the stone and stood there.
The cemetery was empty at this hour. It had become something I needed the way I needed Pete’s sessions and the grief group on Tuesdays. A place to be honest without worrying about what my face was doing.
“Six months, kid.” My voice sounded strange in the quiet. “Half a year. Doesn’t feel like it. Feels like last week and also like it’s always been this way.”
The stone didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected it to.
“I’m sober. Still. Pete says that’s worth acknowledging, so—I’m acknowledging it.
” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I almost didn’t make it last month.
There was a night after a bad run debrief where the bottle was right there and I could taste it before I’d even touched it.
Called Colt instead. Sat on the phone with him for forty minutes while he told me about Luca’s science project.
Didn’t hang up until the wanting passed. ”
A bird landed on the branch above the headstone. Looked at me. Left.
“The boys turned eight last week. Knox never stops talking now. Luca still looks at you like he’s deciding whether you’re worth his time.
Colt says he got that from Lilac. Lilac says it’s pure Colt.
” I paused. “Colt went overboard again. Not as bad as last year, but he had a face painter and enough food for the whole town. Lilac’s about to pop—twins, if you can believe it.
Colt’s losing his mind about it. In a good way. ”
I looked at the headstone for a long time.
“Bea was there. At the party.” I said it to the stone because I couldn’t say it to anyone else without it becoming a conversation about hope or progress or what it meant.
Here it was just a fact. “She looked good. We talked for about ten seconds in the hallway. The kind of thing that used to happen a hundred times a day and now feels like holding your breath underwater.”
I crouched down and adjusted the roses so they sat straighter against the stone.
“I miss you. Not the way I missed you at the beginning—that was all panic and guilt and wanting to trade places. Now it’s just—you’re not here, and you should be.
You should be at that birthday party eating cake and letting Knox beat you at pool.
You should be giving me shit about my route plans.
You should’ve had your patching-in party by now.
The brothers had started tossing around road names for you. ” I swallowed. “You should be here.”
I stood up. My knees protested.
“I’m trying, Danny. I’m doing the work. Not for her, not for the club, not for your memory—for me. Because you believed I was worth saving, and I’m not going to prove you wrong.”
I stayed a few more minutes. Then I got in the truck and drove to Lindsay’s house.
Lindsay had the door open before I knocked.
“I saw you park from the window,” she said, and waved me in without ceremony.
The kitchen smelled the same as it always did—something on the stove, the particular warmth of a small house that was well-lived-in. She put the yellow roses in the vase on the windowsill, next to the photo of Danny in his prospect cut, grinning at the camera with all the confidence of youth.
I’d sat at this table six times now. Each visit had felt different—the first two raw and barely survivable, then steadier, then something approaching ordinary. Not ordinary like forgettable. Ordinary like reliable.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Please.”
She moved around the kitchen the way she always did, unhurried.
Danny had gotten that from her. I used to stand over him while he changed tires — the kid never rushed.
Did everything right, just slow. I’d tell him to pick up the pace and he’d nod and do the next one exactly the same way.
Drove me crazy at the time. Now I’d give anything to watch him take twenty minutes on a rear wheel again.
“How are you doing?” she asked. “Really, not that I’m fine business.”
“Better.” I wrapped my hands around the cup. “Still hard. But I’m handling it differently now.”
“I can see that.” She set the coffee down in front of me. “You look present. Not like you’re trying to escape.”
“I was trying to escape for a long time. Didn’t work out so well.”
“It never does.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “You were his hero. You know that.”
The words landed where they always did—guilt and grief tangled together somewhere behind my ribs. “I should have protected him better.”
“He made his choice.” Her voice was firm. “He chose to protect you, the same way you would have protected him. That’s what brothers do.”
“I know. I’m just—” I took a breath. “I’m trying.”
Lindsay’s eyes softened. “I’ve said this before, but I’m not sure you were ready to hear it.” She squeezed my hand. “Danny didn’t save you so you could suffer forever. He saved you because he believed you were worth saving. Prove him right.”
“And you?” I said. “How are you doing with today?”
She waved the question off the way she always did.
“I’m sad. I miss my son. But he died protecting someone he loved.
Not every mother gets to say her son died a hero.
” She topped up my coffee without asking.
“And you keep coming. You keep talking about him. He hasn’t been forgotten. That matters more than you know.”
I stayed for another hour. Each time I came, she told me a new story.
Today it was his first bike—a secondhand ten-speed that he’d ridden into the mailbox the first day because he was too busy waving at the neighbors to watch where he was going.
I told her about the time he’d misread a route map and led three brothers twenty miles in the wrong direction, then talked his way out of the ribbing by buying everyone lunch with money he didn’t have.
She laughed at that. I laughed too. It surprised me—the sound of it, how natural it felt, how it existed alongside the grief instead of in opposition to it.
“Same time next month?” she said at the door.
“Same time next month.”
She hugged me—the brief, firm kind, the way she always did. “Drive safe.”
“Yes ma’am.”
I drove home in the afternoon light. The road was empty, the radio off, and I sat with the quiet the way Pete had been teaching me to sit with things—not filling it, not running from it. Just letting it be what it was.
Six months. Half a year of building something I couldn’t see clearly while I was inside it. I didn’t know what it would look like when it was finished. I didn’t know if Bea would ever see it, or if seeing it would change anything.
But the coffee had been good this morning. And Lindsay had laughed. And Danny’s roses were fresh on the stone.
That was enough for today.