Page 97 of Brewing Up My Fresh Start

“You drove four hours on a motorcycle to show up at my door looking like roadkill. You’re not going anywhere.” She pauses outside Tyler’s door. “Besides, Tyler loves having sleepovers. Don’t you, sweetie?”

“Yes!” Tyler bounces on his toes. “We can tell ghost stories and eat popcorn and play twenty questions and?—”

“And Uncle Grayson needs sleep,” Amanda interrupts gently. “So one ghost story.”

Tyler’s room looks as if a dinosaur museum exploded. Posters of T-rexes cover the walls, plastic dinosaurs march across every surface, and the twin bed sports sheets featuring various prehistoric creatures engaged in what appears to be a tea party.

“You can have the bed,” Tyler announces generously. “I’ll sleep in my sleeping bag on the floor. It’s more adventurous that way.”

I stare at the tiny bed with its cheerful dinosaur patterns and wonder how my life got to the point where sleeping in a six-year-old’s room feels like exactly what I deserve.

Dinner is controlled chaos. Tyler provides running commentary on his day, Carlos shares stories from his mechanical engineering job that make my development problems seem simple, and Amanda manages it all while shooting me concerned looks across the table.

“So,” she says after Tyler’s been tucked in with promises of pancakes for breakfast, “what happened?”

We’re sitting on her back porch with beer and the kind of comfortable silence that only exists between people who’ve shared the same childhood disasters.

“I messed up the best thing that’s happened to me in years.”

“The coffee shop woman?”

“Her name’s Michelle.” I take a long pull of beer. “I tried to protect her and ended up hurting her instead.”

“Protect her from what?”

I explain the David situation, the impossible choice, the way I handled it with all the emotional intelligence of a brick.

“So you made a decision about her life without including her in it,” Amanda summarizes when I finish.

“I was trying to save her from more heartbreak.”

“By shattering her heart yourself. Without asking if that’s what she wanted.”

The words sting because they’re accurate. “David would have destroyed everything she’s built.”

“And now she thinks you’re the one trying to destroy it.”

I lean back in the porch chair, listening to the suburban sounds of Charlotte—so different from the ocean waves in Twin Waves. “When did you get so wise?”

“When I stopped trying to fix everyone else’s problems and started trusting them to fix their own.” Amanda reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. “Gray, I know losing Mom and Dad made you feel as if you have to protect everyone you care about. But the best protection is just being there, not making decisions for people.”

The mention of our parents hits harder than expected. Twenty years later, and I still catch myself thinking about what I could have done differently the night they drove off angry at each other.

“They were fighting about money again,” I say quietly. “If I’d just stayed out of it, they wouldn’t have left the house upset.”

“Or they would have had the same fight the next night, or the next week. You can’t control other people’s choices, even when you love them.”

We sit in comfortable silence while I wrestle with the uncomfortable truth that I’ve been trying to control outcomes instead of trusting people to make their own decisions.

“What do I do now?”

“You figure out how to apologize for making a choice about her future without including her. And then you trust her to decide whether she wants to give you another chance.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

“Then you’ll have learned an expensive lesson about communication.”

Later, as I try to fit my six-foot-two frame into Tyler’s twin bed, Roxy decides my face needs a thorough inspection via tongue.