More than once last night, he’d been tempted to get out of bed and drive over to her place to see her. But each time he would talk himself out of it when he remembered the look on her face when she’d said, “Don’t you dare blame me for our breakup. You can only blame yourself for not believing in me...”

Again, he could only ask himself how he could have been so fucking stupid. He had spent all those years wanting to hate her. Despise her. Believing she had betrayed him, and as a result, he’d thought all sorts of mean things about her when she’d been innocent of all of it. Totally innocent. Instead she’d been being Bryce. The person who was always a champion for the underdog, the girl who would give you the shirt off her back, a person who was that friend when you needed one.

“And you know this how?”

He glanced over at Sawyer. For him to ask meant he hadn’t heard anything. That didn’t necessarily mean Bryce hadn’t told Vashti, because he had every reason to believe that she had. It only meant Vashti hadn’t told Sawyer. “I know because I saw her yesterday evening when I came in here for dinner.”

“Oh.”

That “oh” had come from Ray. Kaegan moved his gaze from Sawyer to Ray. He might as well level with the two men who were the closest things to brothers he would ever have. “I fucked up.” There. He’d said it. He’d spelled out his torment in three words. Words he felt all the way to his gut.

“Would you care to tell us how?” Sawyer asked quietly.

So he did. He told them everything. About his father’s lies. About what he thought he’d seen that night he’d planned to ask her to marry him. About how he’d treated her when she showed up at that club near the marine base. “For ten years I believed Bryce had an affair with another man and last night I found out it had all been a lie. A fucking lie. I’ve been trying to hate her when I could have been loving her.”

For the longest time the table was quiet. Neither Ray nor Sawyer said anything. Then Sawyer spoke up. “The first step is admitting you were wrong.”

“And the second step is making the wrong right,” Ray added. “I recall when I fucked up with Ashley and you guys came looking for me. It was one of those you-better-get-your-ass-in-gear moments and I took heed. Grudgingly, but I did it.”

Kaegan didn’t say anything as he remembered that day. It had taken all he and Sawyer could do not to toss Ray off his boat into the water to wash some sense into him.

“I’ve had one of those moments myself with Vashti,” Sawyer said. “When she tried to tell me about what had happened at the hospital. I didn’t want to listen or accept it. I refused to believe her and accused her of all sorts of things.”