Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Jake
THIS LATE SPRING evening is the kind of night that makes enduring Virginia winters worth it.
From my back deck, I can see the faint red glow of fishing boat lights out on the lake, their motors humming softly beneath the steady chorus of frogs at the end of the cove.
The air is warm, but there’s a whisper of the cool sixty-degree temperatures that will arrive by morning. Earlier, a storm rolled through—afternoon heat had climbed into the low eighties, heavy enough to break open into thunder and streaks of lightning more typical of summer than spring.
My Labrador, Hattie, had retreated to her usual storm spot under the bed. She’s back out now, lying beside my chair, still wary of stray lightning. Her eyes stay half-open, ears twitching, body tight with suspicion. She hasn’t quite accepted that the storm is over.
She may be right. Virginia weather doesn’t play by any rules.
I reach down and scratch behind her left ear. She licks the back of my hand, then settles again, chin resting on her paws.
It’s quiet now. Aside from the hum of the occasional boat engine, the night is blissfully free of distraction.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have gotten a TV. Something to break the silence.
But then I think of the news—and my stomach turns.
Once you’ve heard your name on a broadcast—attached to a story built on rumor and outrage—you stop thinking of the news as company.
I pick up my beer on the side table, take a long pull. Still cold enough. I close my eyes, but I can still hear her voice. The reporter. I remember every word. The accusations. The fallout. The way my life unraveled in slow motion while the world watched.
I shake the memory off, reach over, and turn on the radio. A classic country station hums to life, delivering an upbeat song meant to take you back to high school Saturdays, windows down, music up, nothing in the world but freedom.
I lean back, let it wash over me. I try to find a memory like that, something light and unburdened.
But they’re slippery now.
Distant.
Like they belong in someone else’s life.
I stare out at the lake. The dark water. The flicker of reflected light.
And I wonder—has the man they painted me to be erased my history?
Did their words steal my own memories of who I was?
I wasn’t raised with much. I worked for everything. Grants. Loans. Long hours. I put myself through college, through grad school. A doctorate in economics. All of it built from scratch.
And what good did any of it do?
Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve been better off following my mom’s path. A job where your paycheck doesn’t depend on reputation. Where no one can accuse you of something you can’t prove you didn’t do. Where your life doesn’t implode from the opinions of strangers.
But the past doesn’t let you rewrite it.
You live. You learn. You course-correct where you can.
That’s what I tried to do—build something new. Something quieter. A life that doesn’t hinge on anyone else’s approval.
I was once social. Friends. Parties. A string of relationships that never quite fit. I kept waiting for the one that would. For the person who would match me. Mirror me. See past my flaws and name them as strengths.
Someone like Sawyer.
Because if I’m honest, she did. Long ago.
Maybe I would have found someone else like her, eventually. But I stopped looking.
You stop wanting to be known when you’re afraid of what people will see.
And maybe that’s the part of me that died, the part that wanted to be chosen for who I was before everything changed.
I reach down and run my hand across Hattie’s soft head.
I’m not lonely, not really. Not in the way people think of it.
I’ve made peace with solitude. I think the part of me that craved companionship, marriage, family, a life with someone by my side, burned out when I saw myself reflected in the headlines.
When I looked into the eyes of students who used to admire me—and found wariness instead.
No one looks at me that way now. And when I look in the mirror, I see what they saw.
I’ve been through every stage of grief. Anger. Denial. And now… acceptance.
This is my life. Not the one I chose, but one I’ve carved out of the ruins. And in many ways, it’s a good life. A quiet one. A stable one.
I’m grateful for my economics education and the interest I’d always had in investing.
That backup plan, the one I never thought I’d need, is what let me walk away when I had to.
It’s what let me buy this farm. The house.
The strawberry field out back. The acres of land that don’t ask questions and don’t pass judgment.
It was a significant purchase. But I needed to put my money somewhere solid. Into something no one could take from me unless God Himself came down and took it.
Because I’m done putting my life in the hands of other people’s opinions.
Now I spend my days tending the soil. Watching something grow from nothing. The strawberries are stubborn but beautiful. They’ll ripen mid-May to early June—bright red, messy. For a few brief weeks, they’ll become something that feels like art.
And then they’ll be gone. But certain to appear again next year. Reliable as only nature can be.
Maybe that’s all we can hope for in this life. That something we create, something we love, leaves a mark. Even if it doesn’t last forever.
I think of Sawyer again. How many times I’ve imagined seeing her. How often I’ve played out the possibility.
Always knowing it would never happen.
And then yesterday, there she was. At a country store. On the heels of something I never imagined living through.
Why now?
Why her?
Hope flickers. Something I thought I’d put away long ago. I let it breathe for half a second—then douse it with the cold water of reality. That will never happen.
Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance. Lightning flashes briefly over the lake.
Hattie shivers and whines, as unsettled by the storm’s appearance as I am by running into the girl—now a woman—I once imagined spending my life with.
I stand, pat my leg, wanting to reassure her even if I can’t reassure myself. “Come on, Hattie. Let’s go inside. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
*
Twenty-Five Years Ago
TOMMY AND I met the summer we both worked at Smith Mountain Dock.
Our jobs there started when school let out.
First weekend of June for me, second weekend of that month for Tommy.
His family came to the lake from Charlottesville for the summer, and we were assigned to the gas pumps—filling tanks, tying up boats, and flirting with whoever drifted in.
Well, Tommy flirted. I mostly watched.
He had the kind of smile that made girls forget whatever they were saying mid-sentence. Naturally confident, charming. I didn’t mind fading into the background. I was shy, and it gave me space to learn his rhythm.
One afternoon, a girl invited us to a party. Her name was Bethany—blonde, cute, loud, a girl who wasn’t used to being told no. Her parents were out of town. The party was at their lake house. It was the kind of situation you know is a bad idea and go anyway because everyone else is.
Tommy drove that night, picking me up at my house just after seven o’clock.
I had my license as well, but no car to drive yet, so I was happy to bum the ride from him in the Jeep his parents gave him for his sixteenth birthday.
On the drive to Bethany’s place, he left the top down and cranked the music.
The big Bose speakers Tommy installed in the back of the Jeep blasted AC/DC, and I remember thinking how great it was to be nearing adulthood with all its infinite possibilities and to have found a new friend as great as Tommy.
I’d had plenty of friends at Franklin County High School.
I played on the football team, not in any capacity that would set state records, but respectably.
There had been something about my last year in school, though.
Maybe it was the fact that I had as much desire to lose myself in a book at lunchtime as to talk about plays for the following weekend’s upcoming football game.
Whatever the reason, there hadn’t been anyone I could call a best friend.
Tommy was someone I had more than just the surface stuff in common with.
He liked books and learning, too. And while I had every reason to suspect his family life was a lot easier than mine, both relationship-wise and materialistically, none of that seemed to matter when it came to the ease with which we were able to talk to each other about stuff I didn’t talk to anyone else about.
After hanging out a couple of times, it became clear to me that Tommy didn’t need to get raging drunk to have a good time. Some of my friends from high school did, although I still hadn’t figured out how a massive hangover the next morning was necessary to have fun on the weekend.
The clincher for me on the subject of alcohol had been my brother’s DUI and subsequent jail time just after his eighteenth birthday.
He’d had a head-on one Saturday night on 122 after leaving a party around two a.m., smashing into a woman taking her elderly grandmother to the hospital in the middle of the night for an asthma attack.
He’d nearly killed both of them, and as far as I could see, it was by the grace of God that he had escaped vehicular homicide.
That experience had jackhammered fear into the core of me.
It just wasn’t worth the risk.
And so, that night at the party when Tommy decided to have a few beers, I volunteered to be the designated driver.
We stayed at Bethany’s until almost twelve-thirty.
My curfew was one o’clock, so I went looking for Tommy, finding him upstairs in Bethany’s bedroom with the door cracked.
When I stuck my head in, it was to see Tommy and Bethany making out on her bed.
Tommy raised up on one elbow. “That you, Jake?”