It’s never too late to make amends for a mistake. You can’t change the outcome, but acknowledging what you’ve done is the first step in helping yourself to heal.

      I am dedicating this book to people who have learned how to let go of what they did wrong. I’m sure the list is long, and since being first seems to intimidate a lot of people, I will volunteer to add my name first.

      My name is Sharon.

      I learned to let go.

      Contents

       Cover

       Back Cover Text

Praise for the novels of Sharon Sala

       Title Page

       Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Epilogue

       Extract

       Copyright

One

      It was raining in Atlanta—what locals called a toad strangler—with water rushing through the streets and into gutters, taking dirt and garbage with it, flowing down into the sewers like shit being flushed down someone’s toilet.

      Sam Jakes had an apartment in downtown Atlanta, in a building that catered to high-end renters with expensive tastes. He hadn’t chosen it because he loved the high life, but because the security factor was second to none. He also liked it for the anonymity it provided for the people who lived there. No names on the mailboxes, just apartment numbers, and no public listings anywhere on site. He’d made enemies running Ranger Investigations, uncovering other people’s secrets and lies. He didn’t want them following him home.

      Sam hadn’t always been a loner. Growing up, he had been as normal and fun loving as any young boy could be. He hunted the mountain behind the family farm outside Mystic, West Virginia, and fished in the rivers. He loved football and pork chops with his mama’s cream gravy, and as he grew older he’d learned to love Lainey Pickett most of all. Then two planes flew into the World Trade Center and changed his life. Instead of beginning his freshman year of college, he’d enlisted in the army and gone to war.

      After his second tour of duty he’d become a bomb tech, learning to defuse everything the enemy could construct, and then went back to war. Nine months later he came home in pieces, burned over half his body and with PTSD so bad that he didn’t turn on the ringer for his cell phone for three months. When he could move without screaming, he changed the ringtone to the opening notes of “Amazing Grace,” and when the hospital finally released him, he moved into an apartment without telling anyone where he was. He didn’t want his family camped out on his doorstep, bemoaning his condition or treating him like an invalid.

      It took close to a year for the burns to completely heal and for him to get mobile enough to go through rehab. It took even more time for him to accept himself. His family came to see him once he let them know where he was, but he wouldn’t go home. In his mind, Sam Jakes from Mystic, West Virginia, was dead and buried in the sands of Afghanistan, which meant Lainey Pickett