My chest tightened at Marty’s words. If anything, Jax didn’t sound like the jerky villain in this town’s story. What it seemed more like was that he was the broken hero, the one who’d fallen apart so much he’d retreated toward the darkness over the light.

Very much like I had after tragedy found me.

“His life has been that bad?” I asked, hopeful that Marty would shake his head and say no.

Sadly, he nodded. “Jax has kind of a dark past. He spent a lot of years keeping to himself while caring for his asshole of a father, up until his father was placed in a hospice center a few weeks ago. Now, if you want to talk about assholes of this town, Cole Kilter was the head B-I-T-C-H. But Jax? Nothing like his father, not in the least, though he does come from asshole genetics.”

“What about his mom?”

Marty frowned. “Like I said, he has a dark past.”

Those words alone broke my heart. I knew how much his mother meant to him, and the idea that she wasn’t around anymore was devastating.

Marty crossed his arms. “Between you and me, I think Jax is the nicest guy in this whole town.” He rolled up his shirt and showed me a scar on his skin. “A few years ago, I got jumped by Lars Parker and his group of jerks. They were coming out of a bar drunk when I was finishing setting up the diner for the next day. They started harassing me about making them some free food, and well, long story short, they jumped me.

“News traveled fast about the incident, and a few days later, Lars and his buddies had their own battle wounds, black eyes and all. I came into work after that, and there Jax was, sitting at his regular booth, reading his paper with both hands bandaged up. He said he had an accident while chopping wood in his back yard. To this day he swears he had nothing to do with kicking Lars’ ass, but I have a feeling he had plenty to do with it. Afterward, he told me to let him know if anyone bothered me. I still thank him for it often, and he always tells me to piss off and bring him his order to go.”

Lars Parker.

The same jerk from when we were kids. Of course it was that same monster who’d come on to me. I knew I had a strange feeling when I met the guy. I wasn’t surprised to see he’d turned out to be the exact jerk he had been on the path to becoming.

Marty headed back to work, and I looked back over at Jax. He shifted around in his booth, and when his head rose up, he turned in my direction. Our eyes locked, and my heart began repeatedly pounding in my chest.

Before I could say anything, Marty brought Jax his to-go bag then he was on his way out of the café, leaving his baseball cap on the table.

I scrambled to leave my money for my bill on the table, and then I hurried over to pick up Jax’s baseball cap.

I dashed out of the café to find Jax and give him his hat, and to…I don’t know…hug him? Cry? Ask him where he’d been all these years? Yet before I could do any of that, my feet froze in place as I stared forward at a little girl standing in front of the ice cream parlor with her mother. She held a cone filled with a double scoop of mint chocolate chip, and she couldn’t seem to lick fast enough to keep it from melting. His mother was rummaging in her purse in search of napkins to help clean up the mess.

I couldn’t look away.

The girl looked to be around five years old, maybe six.

All I knew was that she was young, adorable, and alive.

So very much alive.

I can’t be here, I thought to myself as my chest began to tighten. I wanted to turn on my heels and go the other direction. I wanted to run. I wanted to run so far away, back to the house, and bury myself in a place where the reminder of my loss wouldn’t be presented to me in every way, shape, and form.

Her favorite ice cream was mint chocolate chip.

She’d be talking so much the ice cream would melt down her fingers and make a massive mess no matter how often I tried to clean it up. I’d always have napkins in my purse because I was her mother, and mothers always have napkins in their purse, and…

Stop it, Kennedy. Go home.

But I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place as a panic attack began to sweep across my soul. I couldn’t look away from the child and the mother who was wiping the mess from her chin. I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t breathe.