“She really is,” Mallory affirmed. “But lucky for you, she’s got herself a Bruce, a house to sell, antiques to buy, and a house to build.”
“A full plate,” Cole said with a laugh. “Guess she won’t have that much time to fixate on my expedition.”
Mallory ordered a second beer and excused herself for the bathroom. As she weaved through the chaotic crowd, Alyssa’s laughter rang out gorgeously. When she glanced back, she spotted Alyssa in a flirtatious conversation with another sailor. She made living look so easy, so beautiful.Why can’t I do that?
Her brief affair with Brodie had been disastrous. Since then, she’d hardly glanced at an attractive man, not even when they offered her attention. She’d noticed that the attention came and went, usually based on whether she had her toddler with her or not. She had two modes: mother with baggage or twenty-five-year-old woman with her whole life ahead of her. Technically, she was both at once.
When Mallory returned from the bathroom, she spotted a familiar face in the crowd. Her heart surged with fear at his dark head of chaotic curls, his sorrowful expression, and his broad shoulders.
Brodie Thomkins sat alone at a high-top near the back door, a pack of cigarettes on the table beside his beer. He bent over his phone, his fingers fidgeting over the screen. She hadn’t remembered him being a smoker. Maybe the stress of the trial had made him start.
Just slip out the door. Avoid him. You’ve already put him through so much.
But before she could reach Cole and Alyssa, Alyssa sang out the next words of the song on the speaker: “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay! Watching the tiiiiides roll away!” She was so loud that every single person in the bar lifted their head with curiosity, including Brodie.
And with Mallory’s close proximity to Alyssa, he couldn’t miss her.
For a long moment, Brodie and Mallory held eye contact. Mallory’s lips parted with surprise as her insides contorted. All the while, Alyssa sang on, interested only in her duties of entertainment for the rest of the bar.
Only Cole noticed that Mallory and Brodie remained in a stand-off. He stood quickly, his eyes searching Mallory’s.Do you need help?He seemed to ask. But Mallory shook her head. This was the mess she’d fallen into. She had to clean it up herself.
“Sitting here resting my bones
And this loneliness won’t leave me alone, listen
Two thousand miles, I rom
Just to make this dock my home,” Alyssa sang on, her eyes clenched tight.
Mallory was no longer sure if the show was only a humorous one or if Alyssa’s pain bled through.
“Hi.” Mallory stood in front of Brodie’s high-top, her hands hanging sadly on either side of her hips. He’d once held those hips, falling forward into a kiss.
“Hi,” Brodie returned.
A beat passed. Alyssa’s song only escalated. She was one beer too deep to get all the lyrics just right.
“I didn’t realize this bar had turned into a karaoke bar,” Brodie said.
Mallory’s heart nearly shattered at the joke. It seemed so easy, as though none of the past six weeks had happened.
“Alyssa can make any bar a karaoke bar,” Mallory replied. “But not just any bar. She can also bring karaoke to any ice cream parlor, any diner, any climbing gym, and any ax-throwing establishment.”
“Ax-throwing, huh?” Brodie’s eyes shone with laughter.
Mallory nodded, her heart lifting at the memory of that date they’d had. They’d made up so many stories about the tourists who marched along, oblivious to their fiction.
“I really am so sorry,” Mallory finally whispered. “I know your family’s been through hell the past couple of weeks.”
Brodie dropped his eyes to his sweating beer. Here it was, reality, planting itself between them. Maybe they could never find a way through it.
“At least it’s clear that they weren’t involved,” Brodie muttered. “My mother’s had such a hard go. Actually, her whole life has been one colossal mess after another.” A shadow passed over his face. “I hear whispers about my family everywhere, you know? That we’re white trash. That we shouldn’t be trusted. My friends support me, generally, but I still feel their judgment about where I came from. Once a Thomkins, always a Thomkins. It’s a curse that has followed me around my entire life.”
Mallory’s throat tightened with sorrow. As a Remington and a Steel, she was nothing but lauded for her family history. She seemed to be the contrast to them, the “failure.”
“I just never should have taken it from him,” Brodie continued, speaking mostly down the tunnel of his beer glass.
Mallory’s heart seized. “Who, Brodie? Who did it come from?”