Thirty and a Half Excuses
Page 61

Guilt weighed down my stomach. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No! You don’t understand, and I’m doing a terrible job of explaining it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m glad you know because now I have someone I can talk to about it. I’ve kept it bottled up inside for months, and it’s killing me. If you’ll let me, anyway.”
“Oh, Mason. Of course.”
His eyes found mine, full of sadness. “But when you look at me that way, with pity and helplessness…”
I looked down at my lap. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” His voice broke. “Just be my friend.”
“We already are friends, Mason.” I paused, wondering if I was pushing him too far. “Can you tell me about her? Savannah?”
Amazement covered his face. “You want to hear about Joe’s ex-girlfriend?”
Funny, when I’d asked him that, I hadn’t thought of her as Joe’s ex-girlfriend. “No, I want to hear about your sister.”
Mason broke down into sobs.
I sat on the sofa, watching him, unsure of what to do. If it were Joe, I’d sit next to him and wrap my arms around him, but Mason wasn’t Joe. And if we were going to make this friendship work, especially since I suspected he might have feelings for me, I needed to be sure to keep strong boundaries. But while I’d established that holding Mason wasn’t acceptable, I hadn’t come up with an alternative.
He looked up. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m weak.”
“Weak? How can you say that? Look what you did for her. You found the man who murdered her and got justice.”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t get justice. I wanted cold-blooded revenge, and that’s exactly what I got.” His face paled. “He may not have died, but he’s as good as dead. They don’t expect him to ever wake up from his coma.” He looked up. “If I wanted justice, I would have let the police arrest him and my boss convict him. They had a strong case. He would have gone to prison for the rest of his life. Maybe even got the death penalty. But I decided to seek my own punishment. And in the process, I lost who I was and what I stood for. Until you burst into my life.”
“Me?”
“When you got thrown into jail for contempt of court, after Judge McClary found out you’d been snooping around the murder victim’s house—”
I cringed. “I wouldn’t call it snooping…”
“When I asked you why you did it, do you remember what you told me?”
“Because I loved bologna sandwiches?” I joked.
He gave me a soft smile. “No, you told me you were fighting for justice. You were the only person who believed Bruce Wayne was innocent, and you were going to prove it. You reminded me why I chose this career. I wanted justice, and I still do. Sure, you were fighting to prove Bruce Wayne was innocent, and I was fighting to put him away, but we both wanted the same thing. I’d lost that over the few months before the trial.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Do you really want to hear about Savannah?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I do.”
Mason spent the next fifteen minutes telling me about his sister. They’d been close growing up, even though she was four years younger than him. They loved to argue and drove their mother crazy, so it was no surprise they both wanted to be attorneys. Savannah was outgoing and vivacious. And beautiful. “Our father died when we were in our teens. He and Savannah were close, and she took it really hard,” Mason said. “After his death, Savannah began to look for attention from guys. Often they were destructive relationships, like the one she had with Joe.” Mason’s eyes widened. “Oh. I didn’t mean you and Joe…”
I offered him a soft smile. “It’s okay. I didn’t take it that way at all.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, until I apologized for it.”
I shrugged. “Joe told me a little bit about their relationship. From what I heard, I’m not sure destructive is a bad description.” I purposely avoided defending my own relationship.
“I’m sorry that you’re caught in the middle of this mess.”
Sighing, my shoulders slumped. “It is what it is.”
“Are you still upset I didn’t tell you?”
“No. You were right—it wasn’t your story to tell. Joe’s part anyway. It would have been easy to tell me as a way to get back at Joe.”
“That would have hurt you in the process. There was no way I was going to do that. And as crazy as it sounds, I don’t want to get even with Joe.” He paused, looking out the window. “Not anymore, anyway.” His gaze turned to me. “Do I think he’s partially responsible for Savannah’s death? Yeah, right or wrong, I do. But I don’t want to punish him for it. I’m done with seeking my own retribution.”
I twisted my hands in my lap. “Honestly, Mason, I think he’s punishing himself enough for both of you.”
Mason nodded, looking down at his own hands.
“So you ended up in Henryetta. Was it a coincidence Joe got sent here too? It seems pretty odd.”
Taking a deep breath, he shook his head as he released it. “I don’t know. I lost my job in Little Rock and part of me didn’t even care, especially since my own boss was about to file assault charges against me. But then everything was buried. They weren’t going to file charges anymore, and I was offered another job here in Henryetta. So I packed up and came. It wasn’t until I got here that everything hit me. I left a promising high-power job to come to…this place. And I blamed it all on Joe. I was pretty bitter, which I took out on everyone. Especially you.”