Page 13 of Ebbing Tides (The Lighthouse Duology #2)

She tapped her temple, glancing at me sidelong. “Storing that away for later.”

“So, anyway,” I went on, sidestepping the topic of my childhood and the tumultuous relationship with my father, “it was the fanciest restaurant I'd ever been to, and I got this filet mignon.” I held up my hands, indicating the size of that palm-sized cut of meat. “And it was the juiciest, most incredible steak I have ever eaten in my life. You could’ve cut through it with a fork”—I leaned down to brush my shoulder against hers—“which I didn't, for the record, but I could've .

Melted in my mouth. Abso-freakin'-lutely amazing.

And the saddest part about it is, I couldn't tell you the name of the restaurant even if I wanted to.”

“Maybe you could call Greg and ask,” she suggested.

“Ah, I would, but …” I squeezed the back of my neck. “He was killed in Afghanistan.”

“Oh,” Melanie replied quietly, her voice fading in comparison to the passing cars.

“Yeah,” I muttered sadly, remembering my old friend and his young widow who I … “Wow.”

“Hmm?”

I looked down at Melanie to find her eyes looking back.

“When I hit that pothole, the one that put me at the shop where I met you … I had actually just come from delivering his tags to his wife. If I hadn't been there …”

My words trailed off, wonder and bewilderment shaking my head as I looked off toward a storefront, still decorated for Valentine's Day. Unable to believe that life could truly be that perfectly horrible and orchestrated.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Melanie replied, as if reading my mind. “Even the worst things.”

I hated to think that. Couldn't stand the thought that, if Laura hadn't died, I wouldn't be here, with this woman.

The woman I had mentioned once to my wife but couldn't name and only because I wanted to keep her—Melanie—and her memory to myself.

It was my secret, one I'd planned to take to my grave, long before Laura went to hers, but here I was.

And if there was a heaven and Laura could see me now, what the hell was she thinking? What the hell did she think of me ?

“You know what I could go for?” Melanie asked, effectively putting a stop to thoughts I'd rather not think at all. Not right now.

“What's that?”

I turned my gaze back to hers to find an expression on her face that mirrored everything running through my mind.

Almost as though she were thinking the same thing or something similar—and, hell, for all I knew, she was.

We were, after all, two passengers in the same sinking ship, weren't we?

And maybe that, at the end of the day, really was the reason for it all.

For us to not be alone, and maybe, if we were lucky, we could find a lifeboat together.

“I think I'd really like that decent Guinness stew,” she said, looking up with the smallest of smiles tugging at her downturned lips.

And you know what? So would I.

***

We sat toward the back of the pub at a small high-top table built for two, and a girl of maybe twenty-one or twenty-two took our drink order.

Melanie asked for a beer, and then I ordered a Coke.

As the girl walked away, my thoughts went to the corner of my mind where I kept Lizzie and Jane.

They would be close to the waitress's age, a couple of years younger.

It had been so long since I'd seen them; I wondered if I'd recognize them now if I did.

What if Lizzie was a cashier who'd rung me up or Jane was a barista at the coffee shop I stopped at occasionally on the way to Dad's?

Would I know it? Would they know me … and if they did, would they care enough to say something?

They hate me. Their mother would be here if it wasn't for me.

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Do you want me to … I didn't even think … do you want me to order something else?”

I turned to face Melanie, focusing my attention again on her. “Sorry, what was that?”

Her cheeks were flushed—I had forgotten how easy it was to make her blush—and she tipped her head in the direction of the bar.

“Do you want me to order another drink? You mentioned you had a problem with alcohol, so I wasn't sure if you'd prefer that I didn't drink.”

“Oh,” I said, the word rushing out with an exhale. I shook my head. “No, it's okay. It doesn't bother me when other people drink around me.”

She nodded, her shoulders relaxing. “Okay. I'm sorry. I can't believe I didn't even think about that. My husband … I told you he was an alcoholic, and he was like that. Nobody could have a drink around him without the temptation getting the better of him.”

I nodded. It was a common issue many addicts struggled with, no matter their poison.

I'd never had that issue though. Some people in my life had chosen not to drink in my presence—out of respect, I guessed.

Laura and Sid, namely. But I never asked it of them, nor would I.

Still, it touched me that Melanie would consider it, and I smiled at the thought.

I folded my arms against the tabletop and leaned forward. “So, tell me … anything,” I said, clasping my hands together.

“Anything?”

I nodded. “Yeah, anything. Tell me about your life. Your kids. Your husband … whatever. I wanna know anything.”

The truth was, I wanted to know everything .

I wanted her to lay it all out on the table, to tell me every ugly, beautiful bit of truth that had built who she was in this moment.

I wanted to fill my mind with it, to know her in every definition of the term, and maybe, if I was lucky, at the end of it all, she'd want to know me too.

But more than anything, I just wanted to know her.

To have some facts to add to the memory of her pretty face and the pieces—as few as they might be—that belonged solely to me.

She licked her lips and nodded, clasping her hands and mirroring my stance. “Okay. Where should I start?”

“I don't know. The beginning?”

She laughed at that, looking across the table like I'd lost my mind. “We'd be here for a long, long time if I did that, and you have a job to do, and I have kids to tuck in.”

“Then give me the CliffsNotes.”

She smiled, giving her head a little shake as she bit her bottom lip. “God, you're the same as you were back then.”

“Not exactly the same.”

She tipped her head, studying my face, then said, “No, you are. A little older—”

“A lot older,” I corrected with a sardonic chuckle.

“Okay, a lot older,” she begrudgingly corrected with a playful eye roll. “And you've seen more and felt more, and you're a little more … weathered, I think, but … no, you're the same.”

Through hooded eyes, I looked at her, not nodding or shaking my head. “How can you tell?”

“Because I feel the same way now as I did then,” she replied without hesitation. “Like I can trust you and it'll be okay.”

Then, before I could react to that brazen, loaded statement, she began to talk about how she had moved to a small town in Connecticut when she was in middle school.

Her father opened his auto repair shop while she watched a rebellious boy named Luke from afar, developing a crush on him that wouldn't shape itself into more until she was sixteen and they started dating. She told me about how Luke and Chuck … Charlie’s parents had died when they were just teenagers, how Luke took it upon himself to care for Charlie, and how Melanie took it upon herself to take care of them both.

“You were just a kid too,” I commented, not meaning to interrupt.

“I was,” she agreed, watching as the waitress placed our drinks and bowls of stew on the table. “But I also knew I was more capable than they were. If nothing else, my parents were both still alive and could help me figure it out. Those two though … they had nobody.”

Some people have nobody, even when their parents are alive , I caught myself thinking, as if my situation were at all similar to Charlie’s.

God, poor Charlie …

I’d had no idea he'd suffered so greatly in his life, but as adults, did we ever?

So infrequently did any of us voice our troubles, especially outside the anonymous void of social media.

There was no telling what trauma we were struggling with internally, even if we were wearing a smile. I was more than aware.

Melanie spooned some stew into her mouth, then pursed her lips, nodding affirmatively. “Mmm, yeah, definitely decent.”

I snorted before taking a bite. “Solid five out of ten,” I agreed with my mouth full.

“Oh, come on now, Max. Let's be kind. It's easily a six-point-five.”

In between bites, she continued her story.

She had lived with her boyfriend and his little brother all through her boyfriend's struggles with alcoholism. But even throughout it all, she stuck by his side, hoping something would change … and it did. He got himself into Alcoholics Anonymous, backslid a couple of times, but held strong. She’d thought they were as good as gold, but then, when they were twenty-five, he had kissed another woman at a bar he hadn't been drinking at.

I eyed her with unintentional skepticism because that sounded like a load of bullshit to me.

She shook her head. “No, it wasn't like that.

He had gone in to test himself, to see if he could do it, and I believed him.

I wasn't even mad about it. But he'd been unfaithful to me.

She had kissed him first, and he said he'd pushed her away, but the fact that he hadn't told me about it until he was forced to …” A bitterness, deep and faded with time, flashed over her gaze as she stared into the past. “I left at that point.”

“How long after we met was that?”

“Oh, um …” She calculated the time in her mind before shrugging. “A few years maybe? Two, three?”

“I almost kissed you that night,” I blurted out.

Her throat shifted with a swallow. “I know.”

“And if I had …” I hung my head, thinking about how differently things might've been for her at that point in time. She would've been the one to be unfaithful to him, and that would've been my fault.