Brad nodded before abruptly turning to Ellis. “You want to talk to her alone now?”
She didn’t think she imagined that Ellis went a little pink in the face. “Sure, buddy.”
He got up. “I’ll go sit out there.” He quickly left the room.
Once the door closed, Ellis slumped in his chair and let out a long breath as he rubbed his forehead.
This was the mystery Mandaline truly felt drawn to. She suspected it was part of the reason Julie had designated their case as urgent.
“Thank you for humoring him,” he said.
She put down her pen. “I know it’s none of my business, but since I suspect you and I are now technically in collusion or whatever it’s called, can I ask what’s going on?”
That earned her a wry smile as he met her gaze. “How long you got?”
Brad walked out to the front of the store and sat on one of the sofas, where he could look out the windows and see the center of town. The courthouse complex stood in the middle of the main square. Across the way he spotted the bakery.
“Libbie,” the woman whispered in his mind.
He nodded, listening. The woman had started coming to him a few days earlier, but Brad hadn’t said anything to Ellis about her.
He’d only think it’s another problem.
He loved Ellis. He loved him for taking care of him when he didn’t have anyone, and he loved Ellis for humoring him when anyone else would have simply had a court commit him to an assisted living facility.
He knew he had his good days and his bad. Today was actually a good day. If he’d wanted, he could drive.
Not that he’d tell Ellis that. It would give Ellis indigestion.
The woman softly laughed at that thought, which made him smile.
Behind the counter, a woman—
“Sachi,” the woman whispered.
Sachi. He mentally rolled the name around for a while. He’d remember that name. As he would Mandaline. Beautiful names. He sometimes had trouble remembering names. It frustrated him, because before everything, before, then he’d had a perfect memory.
Before.
Of all the things he missed about his old self, he missed his mind the most.
He almost giggled aloud at the thought. He knew it was a common bumper sticker saying.
From behind the counter, Sachi watched him with a wary eye. He let his gaze drift around the storefront, until it fell upon a beautifully carved wooden box sitting high on a shelf next to the counter. Beside it, a small vase of wildflowers.
Before his brain processed it, he stood and walked over to the box.
No, not box.
“You’ll think of it,” the woman whispered.
Then, the lightbulb moment.
Urn.
The woman laughed as if delighted with him.
“You’re Julie.” He knew it was right as soon as he silently spoke it to her.
She hadn’t told him her name, going quiet every time he’d asked. He’d quickly learned to stop asking.
Now he knew who she was. He felt glad about that. He didn’t often have voices in his head, but he preferred knowing their names when he did. “I thought you sounded familiar.”
She gently laughed.
Chapter Three
“We’re not gay,” Ellis said by way of starting. “I don’t know where else to begin but there, so you can understand. As I said, he’s like a brother to me. We’ve been friends since first grade. His dad was arrested on drunk driving charges. Manslaughter. He went to jail.”
“Yikes.”
“Oh, that’s the good part of the story.”
“The good?”
“It goes downhill from there. His mom obviously had a hard time after that. His dad killed a bicyclist. She filed for divorce when it happened. He’d been drinking off and on for years, but that was the last straw for her. She lost everything when the family sued her husband. She basically had to start over as a single mom.
“My parents are good people. They didn’t turn their backs on her like a lot of people did. They knew her husband’s sins weren’t hers, or her son’s. My parents included Brad in everything, my after-school stuff, taking him on the weekends so she could work, became his family. He spent more time at our house than at his. So when I say we’re like brothers, that’s because we are.”
She sensed a great sadness envelop him. “He has good days and bad days,” he softly said. “He’s not crazy. He’s not autistic or mentally disabled. He’s suffered traumatic brain injuries. And it’s my fault.”
“What?”
“Long story short, his mom died when we were in high school. She couldn’t afford medical insurance. She had cancer, but she didn’t know it. By the time she was so sick she had to go to the ER, she was too far gone for the doctors to help her. My parents took him in and were granted custody of him, but they couldn’t afford two college tuitions. Fortunately, he scored an academic scholarship. Which was great, because we were both going to be lawyers. Our dream was to open an office together.
“But in college he kind of slacked off. I was busy with my own stuff and should have been riding his ass. He ended up losing his scholarship.”
“That’s not your fault.”
He slowly nodded. “Oh, yes it is. One night we were talking about options for him to try to make money to afford tuition. I made the mistake of suggesting he could enlist in the military and then go back to college after he did his time.” He looked down at his hands. “I didn’t think he’d really do it. I don’t even know why I said it. I wish I hadn’t said it.”
He finally looked up at her again. “He went and enlisted early the next morning without talking to me or my parents about it first. Ten months later, he was sent over to Afghanistan.”
She suspected she knew where this story was going, but she didn’t interrupt him.
“He served in the Middle East for nearly four years. One day, the vehicle he was in ran over an IED. After three weeks in a hospital in Germany, he was stable enough to be shipped stateside, where he spent a few more months in the hospital before they gave him a medical discharge.”
“He looks good.” She winced. “That came out wrong, I’m sorry.”
He waved it away with a smile. “No, he does look good. He caught the worst of the blast in his back. That’s why he wears his hair like he does. It hides the scars on the back of his head. That, unfortunately, wasn’t the worst.”
“What?”
“The blast left him with PTSD and some memory issues because of a fortunately fairly mild TBI. But once he physically healed, he could live independently, drive, no problems like that. He went back to college. He lived with my parents while he was putting his life back together. I graduated first and went to work for a firm in Tampa. He moved in with me while he was still going to school. He couldn’t afford a car, so he got a motorcycle. And that definitely is my fault.”
She didn’t ask. She let him spin the tale in his own way.
“I was going to cosign a car loan for him, but he wouldn’t let me. Said he didn’t want it to get weird between us if something happened and he couldn’t make the payments. A friend of mine was selling a motorcycle, and they met at our house one night. When Brad found out about the motorcycle, he decided that was what he wanted, and he bought it.
“He loved that thing. It was an older Harley. He wore a helmet, jacket, gloves, everything. All the safety gear. And he loved it. Rode it in all sorts of weather. He graduated college and law school and I got him into the firm I worked for. He finally got a car, but he kept the bike to ride on weekends. He still had issues with PTSD, and sometimes his memory, but the memory stuff he learned to work around by training himself to take notes about everything and keep them in his phone and on the computer. Unless you knew what he’d been through, you never would have known he had any problems.”