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“I’ll say It was all real quick” She sighed

Their briefing had taken all of two days and then they were gone And Mitch was dead Real quick

“We had fun though, didn’t we?” she asked

“It was the wine,” he said, though Mitch had been the only one who’d drank it

“It was the company And the stories” She pulled at a thread in the herowing up and all the trouble you got into”

“Mitch got us in trouble, I was just the cleanup” The official blame-taker No one had believed the troubled kid with the drunk for a father and everyone had believed the star football player who could always outrun the cops

“Co the water toas your idea”

He sht”

There had been good times with Mitch His wild streak had called out to Jesse’s own and in high school there was nowhere he’d rather have been than causing trouble with Mitch

Mitch, however, had adopted that wildness as his life mission Jesse found that, by default, he’d still been expected to clean up after his old buddy, long after the thrill had worn off for him

She wrapped her arms around her knees and lifted her feet a little off the step so she balanced on her butt

“Mitch told me you were a dancer,” Jesse blurted

Julia shook her head, her eyes suddenly darker “My husband said a lot of things…most of them not true”

“He wasn’t known for his honesty”

Julia’s eyes got sadder and Jesse could feel syut The silence stretched and he watched her profile, the sweet line of her cheek, her nose The perfect rose of her mouth He was the only other person in the world who knehat Mitch was really like—and high on painkillers he couldn’t deny her the small bit of comfort she clearly needed

“He was hard on the people who loved him,” he finally said

She turned wide eyes on him “You sound like a man with experience” She tried to s married to Mitch had cost her

His hands itched to stroke her narrow shoulders, but not for comfort Not as further cleanup after Mitch