The Comeback

By Ashley Zakrzewski

The past can haunt us…

 

Solomon has done things in the past that will haunt him for the rest of his life, but after two trips to rehab, he is determined to make sobriety stick this time. There is one important person he needs to make amends to… Shiloh.

 

Shiloh agrees to meet with him, hear him out, but he's claimed to have changed before, and she has a daughter to think about now. So, she keeps Solomon at arms length and listens to his script.

 

Their history is hard to ignore, and it's palpating. Sometimes good people do bad things, but are people really capable of change?

 

Will Shiloh being back in his life test his sobriety or will Solomon find the peace he's been needing for years?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ashley Zakrzewski
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215695876

Ashley Zakrzewski

USA Today & International Best Selling Author Ashley Zakrzewski is known for her captivating storytelling, sultry plots, and dynamic protagonists. Hailing from Arkansas, her affinity for the written word began early on, and she has been relentlessly chasing after her dreams ever since.

Book preview

Chapter One

Solomon bought himself a hot chocolate at Starbucks and took a seat at a table near the door, so she’d see him. He’d cut caffeine out, too, because he never half-assed anything. Aside from a two-week-long headache, the downside to quitting caffeine and alcohol together was that it eliminated nearly all of the social spaces he could inhabit. Even coffee shops made him uncomfortable. But he had to do it, He had to follow the steps. Step nine, make amends. He had to make amends and it started with his ex girlfriend who so happened to be the love of his life, even after all these years.

As he waited, he checked his phone impulsively, and wondered if it was an addiction too, if he’d ever be able to eliminate all reliance on external things, even if they did seem innocuous or socially acceptable. She hadn’t replied to him after he confirmed plans with her. His I’ll see you then hung seen at 8:22pm two days ago. Since then, he’d barely been able to sleep or eat, his mind affixed on all the things he wanted to say, all the things she might reply. It’d been a decade since he’d seen her last. Back then, he thought they were adults, twenty-two, but over the long span of their courtship, they’d stripped each other of growth, stagnated emotionally at sixteen by burying their potential into their relationship. He fucked up a lot of things, but he still conceded that what they had was complicated, and even now, he couldn’t understand it. No one had since come close to what he and Shiloh had.

When she arrived, she didn’t see him right away. He was grateful for it; it gave him the opportunity to look at her. He thought he’d been nervous before, but now his heart was pounding and he had trouble breathing. Once, she’d felt like an extension of him. He knew her body as well as his own. He could think through her mind. Now she was a stranger, standing a few feet away, looking down at her phone. Her hair was short, cropped at her chin. She was wearing a floral blouse and leggings, a scarf, flats. Just a little bit of makeup. Her acne had cleared up, but otherwise she looked nearly the same, except for simply, older. No physical trait that could be discerned, but she was no longer somebody you’d card at a bar. She held herself differently, confident, at ease.

Only when she ordered her coffee — drip, black, that was new — did she look around. She didn’t smile when she spotted him, vacant but for a spark of recognition. On one hand it was a relief, that she wasn’t going to treat this as a friendly, polite affair. Fake. On the other, it terrified him. This was a person he had hurt, a person who by all means should have seen his message and promptly blocked him, who should have called the cops on him at one point and taken him to court, who should have dragged him to rehab or a psych unit on countless occasions. But her biggest mistake was that she’d always believed in him, always loved him for the man he could have been, not the man he was. The fact she was here, taking a seat across from him, told him that she still had hope.

Hi, she said, dropping her purse by her feet. Now she was smiling, not happily but shyly. She had a tinge of red in her cheeks.

Hey. He sat on his hands. He should have stood up to hug her, or greet her in some other way than by staring at her dumbly. The last time he’d seen her, she didn’t even say goodbye. She said, See you later, and handed him her keys. Then she kissed him, an easy, sweet kiss. They continued texting for a while after that, out of habit mostly, until she stopped sharing pieces of her life with him, and eventually quit replying entirely. Later, she unfriended him on Facebook, and later, he realized her replies had only ever been a courtesy, not to leave him drifting after she’d clearly moved on.

How are you? He shoved down a grimace at his own stupid question, platitudes when he should be on his knees, or in a cell, or dead.

Good, she said. You?

Kind of a loaded question.

She lifted her eyebrows at him, amused seemingly by the fact he, Solomon McMare, renowned partier, larger than life, a man who had once punched a police officer in the face, could not pick up his hot chocolate for fear of spilling it over his trembling hand.

What do you do now? she asked casually, taking a sip of coffee and politely not calling out what a wreck he was, what she surely knew the truth of this meeting to be. He never deserved her compassion then, and he certainly didn’t now.

Freelancing. Front-end development stuff.

He couldn’t meet her eyes to tell if she was impressed by that. Not that she should be, that he possessed a basic marketable skill, and was capable of living on his own and supporting himself. It was the bare minimum of existence, nothing to be proud of.

Did you ever — ?

No, he said quickly. Go back to school, she was about to say. He’d always had a knack for technology, had once built himself a PC out of used parts he found at garage sales, so he was a computer science major for a short while, and after he dropped out, kept with it because it was the only piece of identity he had left. Computer nerd. Gamer.

Self-taught, he said. There’s tutorials for everything now. You?

Pediatrician.

He ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as her. Then again, that was the line of thinking that got him into this mess. He rooted around in his brain for an affirmation, but none came.

Are you happy? he asked. He meant with her choice of career, which she’d been somewhat strong-armed into by her mother, but also generally.

I am, she said, but he couldn’t tell if it was another platitude. If the things he’d said and done still haunted her, kept her from love and trust and intimacy. Maybe he was inflating his own importance in her life by thinking that, underestimating her ability to heal. Are you?

No.

He tugged at the cardboard corner of his coffee sleeve, could feel her eyes on him, assessing him in her enormous, brilliant mind, which had always made him feel ten inches tall, even when she was the one constantly seeking his reassurance and validation. It had made him feel powerful once, to be seen by someone like her, to bring her down to his level so she would never know the sick truth: she was too good for him. She’d always been too good for him.

I’m in a program now, he said. Mervyn had been so easy, even though he’d destroyed the guy’s car in a drunk driving accident years ago. Solomon told him things sucked and now he knew better, and nothing like it would ever happen again. Mervyn forgave him and that was that. They’d probably never be friends again — Solomon didn’t have friends anymore, for their sake — but at least they could be on good terms.

A program, Shiloh repeated. Her face was impossible to read, curious or critical or proud, he had no idea. He wanted to puke.

With twelve steps. He pulled the corner, hard, and the sleeve came apart and fell off the cup. It didn’t matter. His hot chocolate had gotten cold. I’m on nine. Making amends.

How long have you been sober?

Three years, two months, eleven days.

Three years.

Wow.

He started drinking when he was nineteen. He had a problem by twenty-one, but he didn’t know it at the time. He considered himself a social drinker, evenings and weekends. They lived on campus. There were parties every night, and everyone knew Solomon brought the fun. When Shiloh began worrying about him, he tried to quit but only switched to weed and benzos. Then his mom died, and things got bad, then worse, and Shiloh broke up with him. He started drinking again. He was a blackout drunk; the memory of his young adulthood was peppered with wide blank spots. Years of his life looked like swiss cheese. He hit rock bottom at twenty-six, when he lost his job and ran out of money and robbed a liquor store, which he had no recollection of. He spent thirty days in jail and got shuffled into rehab. When he got out, he told himself moderation was key, that sobriety would never work for him. A few more years of slipping slowly toward rock bottom again, and he finally decided sobriety was the only answer, the only way out. The second round of rehab caught, and he’d been sober ever since.

I have to keep at it, he said. I can’t give up on myself.

She smiled, a real one this time, not with her mouth, but in her eyes, and quickly schooled her features back to skepticism. He felt the small surge of adrenaline he used to get when he did something to earn her happiness, her praise. Shiloh’s smile was his first addiction.

I acknowledge, he continued, his tone measured, his speech rehearsed, the things I did to you were horrible. Inhumane.

She averted her gaze, then, and he saw fear flicker across her face. He hated that he’d ever put that look on her. Even now, just admitting the things he’d done was enough to bring it back.

Please, I’m. I was sick. That doesn’t excuse it, but. He was going off script. Next he was supposed to pull out his list, everything he could remember that he’d done to her, which was agony to write, but he couldn’t do that if it would hurt her. That was one of the rules. I’m on medication. I went to rehab, twice. I have a therapist. I go to two AA meetings a week.

Her eyes darted to the exits, to the people nearby. Two women were sitting beside them, college students probably, textbooks open between them. He’d chosen the busiest Starbucks in town for that purpose, so she wouldn’t feel cornered.

Okay, good for you, she said. What do you want from me?

I want you to know, nothing that happened between us was your fault. You were good to me, and I hurt you. A lot.

When he’d rehearsed it in his head, this was the point she started crying. Back when, she cried on a dime. A commercial with a dog in it, all Disney movies, a stray thought that caught her the wrong way. She held her emotions close to the surface. She’d been trained out of expressing them, though, forced into complacency. Covered her laughter with her hand. Apologized for being too loud. Always trying to make herself small, take up as little space as possible. He made that worse, he knew he did. He admired it about her, in their early days, that she could feel so openly. That she had emotions at all to hide, when he barely had any, except for anger, which felt most days like something separate from him, something he carried around that he could never get rid of.

Now, she didn’t cry, or make any expression at all. She was thinking, he could see that much.

Thank you, she said. I know it, but. I appreciate that. That you know it too.

The barista called the name of the next coffee order. Double-shot latte, extra foam. A line had piled up at the cash register, and a gust of cold