“That place has been gone a long time.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “I learned that. I learned the club folded. I learned some of the men passed away. Some moved. Some disappeared into the regular world the way men like that rarely do without taking pieces of themselves apart first.”
Jim’s eyes narrowed.
“You did your homework.”
“I had to.”
Rebecca finally set the folder on the coffee table.
“Dr. Reed didn’t come here casually, Mr. Lawson.”
Jim looked at the folder.
Then back at her.
Then at Tommy.
The air in the room changed again.
This time it felt like standing on the lip of something.
“What’s in there?” Jim asked.
Tommy didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he looked at the old photograph in Jim’s hand and said, very quietly, “Before I tell you that, I need you to know something.”
Jim waited.
Tommy’s voice dropped lower.
“There were nights, back then, when I lay awake and tried to figure out how hungry a person had to be before hope ran out. There were mornings I pretended to be sick because getting hit before first period felt worse than any fever. There was a week before you showed up when I’d decided maybe the easiest thing was to stop asking for help.”
Jim felt something cold move through him.
Tommy held his gaze.
“You and your brothers changed the direction of my life,” he said. “Not in some poetic, exaggerated way. Literally. If you hadn’t shown up when you did, there is a very real chance I wouldn’t be here.”
Jim stared at him.
His mouth opened.
Closed.
And suddenly the present blurred.
Because he was no longer in a run-down rental with bad knees and a cat in his lap.
He was back in a small town in the middle of summer, with a calloused hand on a gas tank warm from the road, listening to a worn-out single mother on a front porch try not to cry in front of strangers.
Back when he still had brothers at his back.
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