An Ounce of Hope (A Pound of Flesh #2)(2)

You are the milk to my Oreo, and I adore each and every one of you.





Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.

—Samuel Smiles





The first time Max O’Hare thought about taking his life was the day of his father’s funeral. It was a bleak mid-October morning, the kind where wind whips at your face, and rain doesn’t fall, but pours in torrents and makes even the most happy-go-lucky of *s consider what the hell they were cheerful about in the first place.

Max had watched them lower his father’s casket into the ground, right next to Hazel O’Hare’s, Max’s mother. The beautiful headstone above her plot, which showed in stunning gold lettering how she was only twenty-six when she was killed in a head-on collision on her way to her son’s second birthday party, now had a neighbor. After a courageous eighteen-month battle with pancreatic cancer, Connor O’Hare had finally succumbed to the cruel disease at the age of forty-five, leaving Max an orphan.

An orphan who couldn’t help but wonder just what the f*ck he was meant to do with his life.

Sure, there was the family business, a specialist auto body shop where Max had learned his father’s trade as a mechanic with an enthusiastic eye and a hero-worshipping ear, but that shit became superfluous when Connor was no longer able to work. The f*ck hot muscle cars and the roaring engines; none of it mattered. All that mattered was when the next round of chemo was, and what ridiculous figure the medical bills were amounting to.

Not that Max’s father ever complained or worried about that. He’d smile when Max started to stress about appointments and money, and tell him life was too damned short to sweat the small stuff. But that was the way Connor O’Hare was. Maybe that’s why he never lost his shit when, as a teenager, Max was brought home numerous times in a police cruiser, or when he was arrested for dope possession and car boosting. You’ll find your way, his father would say with a disappointed shrug that made Max’s teeth grind in guilt; these are just bumps in the road, son.

Max wasn’t so sure, but similarly, he didn’t know why he got into the shit he did. Boredom maybe? Hell, he couldn’t even use having a shitty home life as an excuse. His father was a good man who did his best raising his son alone. No. Max was a law unto himself, his own worst enemy. He wished to be strong like his dad, noble and dedicated, but he failed every damned time.

True to form, Max’s father’s battle against his illness was valiant, and he stayed brave to the very end, but his death wasn’t that of a warrior. It wasn’t romantic. There were no whispered words of love or declarations of life lessons and regret, what with him being unable to speak—the cancer had affected his lungs and throat by then. Max simply watched his father become more and more ravaged by an illness, which stole away the tough vibrancy he’d known and respected. All that was left was an aged shell of a man who slipped away in his sleep while Max held his hand from his permanent vigil at the side of the hospital bed.

Such was the grief that gripped Max, that he didn’t even cry. His eyes stayed resolutely dry, as though sorrow blocked every part of him, every tear duct, vein, and artery. Yeah, that shit was grim.

He had friends around him, of course. Friends—who were more like family—and were prepared to bend over backward for him. Anything we can do. I’m here if you want to talk. Jesus, he could barely get out of bed in the morning and they were expecting him to talk. He appreciated it, sure, but their words were breaths on a breeze that, as time passed, continued to guide Max into a dark depression. That darkness culminated in his downing a bottle of vodka and snorting a dozen lines of coke, while staring passively at a bottle of pills he’d found among his father’s things.

It’d be so easy, he’d thought.

So f*cking easy.

And painless.

That’s what he wanted above all other things: a pain-free existence.

But he hadn’t gone through with it. Cowardice was not something Max was proud of, but, like his best friend, Carter, had explained: he was twenty years old and had his whole life to live. And live it he did. He got shitfaced, f*cked women, dealt in shit he had no business getting involved in, became a regular dealer, got shot at, got arrested, got bailed . . . rinse and repeat.

Not a life so much as an extended hangover, punctuated with pockets of deliriousness. He kept the body shop afloat with the money he made from dealing, paid his employees, and partied from sunset to sunrise. And as the months passed, the pain Max had felt the day of the funeral slowly ebbed, leaving a numbness in which he freely basked. He didn’t feel pain. Christ, he didn’t feel anything. And that was just fine.

He doubted he’d ever feel again. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to.

Until she tumbled into his life . . .

Max lifted his eyes from the sumptuous cream carpet under his feet, settling them on the man sitting opposite him. Elliot waited patiently for Max to say something else, but Max knew he was done. He’d said more than he’d wanted to already. He hadn’t spoken about his father for a long time and scratching at that particular scab was as agonizing as it had been on the day of the funeral eight years before.

He reached for the glass of water on the small wooden table at the side of his chair and took a long sip. The silence was suffocating in its expectancy, causing Max to fidget and shift in his seat.