Here is a sixth excerpt from my book:

“It was about a month later, again on a Friday night, that I got a phone call at the store just like the previous one. Once again, there was no reply from the other side. Once again, I knew it had to be Lynn. Sure enough, a few minutes later, she drove into the parking lot. She was wearing a t-shirt and blue jean shorts, and looked great. She hadn’t been in the store very long when my parents pulled in to buy some gasoline. My two-year-old niece was with them, and they had been to the home football game. Lynn and I went out to talk to them, and mom and dad told her they were glad to see her. After they left, once again, there was just the two of us in the store, and no customers for an extended period of time. She sat down on a stack of pop cases, and I took my place behind the counter.

She started to say, “I came here . . .to apologize . . .” She began to cry, and I walked quickly around the counter and said, “Oh, Lynn.” I knelt in front of her, and tried to wipe her tears away with my hand, but they were coming too fast. I hated to see her so upset and wounded. She said that one of our mutual friends had pointed out to her, “Now you know how Silver felt when you left him last year.” I told her that I never wanted to get hurt like this. I could tell that the full force of what she had done the year before had come down on her in a similar fashion, but I had never wished it upon her. I consoled her as best I could, and even got her to smile and laugh some. By the time we were finished talking, I think we both were happy again in that moment. When she walked out of the store to go to her car, she looked back at me with the same beaming smile she had in the early days of our relationship.

I don’t really know for certain if her motivation was for us to get back together, or just her remorse for the pain she’d caused me by experiencing something similar herself. I never asked. At the time, even when the thought did cross my mind that she might want us back together, I probably would have declined the opportunity. I had been in the process of putting myself back together for a year, and, though I still wasn’t where I wanted to be, if she were to break my heart again, I probably couldn’t have taken it.”

Here is a fifth excerpt from my book:

“After another sleepless night, I decided that showing up to work, if for no other reason that to see what was going to happen, was what I needed to do. I had never been much of a quitter, even though quitting at everything in my life in which I had been involved was always a constant. It would have been even better if they fired me than if I were to quit; that way I would have no alternative but to leave town and return to the Ozarks.

I dove into completely unfamiliar waters in the dark of night and began to swim. The company decided to put a finance manager, whose hands were clean of the bad procedures of the prior managers, in charge on a temporary basis. He was roughly my age, with a wife and young son, and was a very approachable and likeable guy. He seemed like he was willing to help me and the other salesmen out, but he was only here as a transitional figure, and that was in an assistant role. The dealership was planning to move one of its best finance managers to our location to clean up the mess left behind.

We also began to piece together what exactly had led to the investigation. It seems that Brig had photocopied some incriminating paperwork before she quit and had approached upper management about taking her story to the local news media. The dealership had worked with local law enforcement to do a private investigation, fired the managers who were responsible, and quietly sweep the whole matter under the rug.

As part of the agreement, Brig would be given her job back. When she walked into the building that Wednesday night, exactly forty-eight hours after the previous bosses were fired, my face went white. This was quite a conundrum: on one hand the unethical practices of my former bosses was their downfall, and had created a bad environment for all of us in which to work. On the other hand, Brig had essentially blackmailed the company into firing two people and giving her back her former position, a job in which she had quit, as opposed to getting fired. Oh, for the simple days of working for the school as a tele-counselor for minimum wage!”