Page 50 of My Unfinished Heart

“Serves you right, motherfucker.”

I laugh because he means for me to.

“There’s other people I could have asked for money, Arch. I just…wanted it to be you.”

“Why?” I ask. Because now, I don’t feel like I deserve to be the one who helps him through this.

He gives me a long look, and somewhere inside it, I see the guy I used to know. The baseball star. The sun I orbited.

“Fishbowl,” I say.

“Fishbowl,” he agrees.

I guess I talked about that hypothesis with him at some point.

“You want me to buy the bar?”

“Only if you’ll sign something guaranteeing me a job there when I get out.”

“I can guarantee you an interview.”

He grins. “I’ll take it.”

I gesture at the TV. “What about this place?”

He picks up his beer and leans hard into the cushions of the leather couch. “I’m putting it on the market.”

“Do you like it?”

He looks around, so I do, too. So much of his personality is infused into the brick and the bookshelves. The house itself suits him. Humble but warm, filled with simple luxuries like worn leather and a sick flatscreen. He always loved this neighborhood with its older homes tucked in the hills of central Austin.

“Don’t sell it,” I say. “Let me handle it.”

He takes a deep breath, like he’s trying to absorb yet another hit to his pride, and I get it, but he’s not a charity case. Not to me. He doesn’t need me to swoop in and save him. He could sell his business, sell the house, get the money he needs. But I do owe him more than I’ll ever be able to repay. Money is nothing. Time is nothing, not compared to what he and his mom gave me.

“Whatever you need, you can have,” I say. “I’m here. I won’t take off again.”

“I know what this is,” he says. “I know I’ll owe you.”

“No. You won’t. First, I hate this money. Second, I’m being selfish. And a coward maybe. You like your lawyer?”

He stares hard at me for a long moment. “Do you want a beer?”

I accept his olive branch. He gets us some cold beers, and we talk about his lawyer. He does like him but doesn’t immediately dismiss my idea to put together a team that might keep him out of prison, or at least get his sentence reduced.

Once we start agreeing more than we’re disagreeing, the Rangers win, and we go to Strange Days, holing up in his office to make a plan for protecting his assets if Plan A doesn’t work out. The odds are he’ll serve time, but it’s impossible to know how much. He’s planning to plead guilty if he gets a good enough offer from the prosecutors, but in terms of the actual sentence, the judge will have the final say, and there’s no court date yet.

“What happened after I left?” I finally ask him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—college. The DUI? Baseball?”

He inhales deeply and settles back in his chair. “I tore my rotator cuff freshman year. Then I got hooked on pain meds. It escalated. I had to go to rehab, so that blew my shot at baseball, and honestly, I took it kinda hard.”

“Jesus.”

He shrugs. “I’m four years off drugs. Still working on alcohol. Obviously.”