Page 105 of Bad Luck Club

And now, in a cab in the same city where his mother had died three days after he’d sobbed in her arms, he was leaning his cheek on a different woman’s shoulder. Holding her bony hand. And sobbing out an ocean of pain.

Dottie whispered words of comfort, and while he knew she was speaking, the words themselves were incomprehensible. It didn’t matter. He felt her love pouring into him. Soaking into the marrow of his being, but he’d been so empty for so long, he was like a bottomless well.

Now that the dam to his pain had been broken, it felt infinite. Endless. He gasped, feeling like he was drowning.

Dottie turned to him with tears of her own, cupping his face. “That’s it. Let out the bad energy. You have to let out the bad to let in the good.”

Good? How could there ever be anything good?

His entire life felt like a waste. After his mother’s death, he’d chased the hopeless dream of gaining his father’s approval. And now his mother’s words rang in his head, her parting wish, which he’d shoved into the recesses of his mind.

“There’s more to life than money, Lee. There’s more to life than power. Real power comes from love, both the love you give and the love you receive.”

Prescott Buchanan thought love was for the weak-minded.

In his desperation to become the man his father wanted him to be, so had Lee.

Then his father had ripped his life out from underneath him, and he’d lost everything.

He’d thought he’d found something even better in Blue. She added color to his drab, boring life. She made him feel like maybe he could love and be loved too. Like maybe he didn’t need to be what anyone else wanted him to be. Like maybe it was okay for him just to be himself.

Only she’d betrayed him too.

His tears began to subside, and Dottie reached into her giant handbag and pulled out a handkerchief and a reusable water bottle, handing both to him.

He wiped his face, but it still felt slick from his tears. Then he grabbed the water bottle and took a long swig.

Dottie was still holding his hand, and the rational part of him, which was slowly returning, told himself he needed to let go, but the lost little boy in Lee, the one his mother had left behind, wasn’t ready.

He expected Dottie to fill the silence—she always seemed to know exactly what to say—but she just sat with him, being there without asserting herself.

Finally, he said, his voice gravelly, “I hated you, you know.”

“When was that, dear?” she asked kindly, as though he’d just told her there was snow in the forecast.

“When I met you. Last June. You were just so…”

“Weird,” she said with a smile.

“I was going to say different. But, yeah,” he conceded with a shrug. “And I blamed you for convincing Georgie to stay. I was just starting to get close to Addy, and then she left me too.”

“Is that what it felt like?” Dottie asked. “That the people who loved you were leaving you?” She held his gaze. “Like your mother?”

He sucked in a breath.

“Laura was a wonderful woman,” Dottie said. “When a light as special as hers is extinguished, it creates a void. One that can only be filled with love. Something Prescott is incapable of giving.” She squeezed his hand. “Beau was so worried about you children. He flew to Connecticut to see you, but Prescott refused to allow it. Refused to let him attend the funeral.” Her lips pressed into a tight line. “It nearly broke Beau, but what was he to do?”

“I didn’t know,” he whispered.

“How could you?” she asked, smiling through her tears. “The brewery was his last chance to try to make things right for Laura. He knew how much it would have hurt her to see you all drift apart from one another.”

“That wasn’t the only reason I hated you,” he said, shame washing through him in hot, thick waves.

She nodded. “The recording of your father.”

“I knew it was irrational. If anything, you saved me. But still, I blamed you. For a while I blamed Jack too.”

“Sometimes we need a fall guy until we can let ourselves see the real villain.”

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