caught us in the barn together, those horrible things you said to me out in the yard…”
“Yeah?”
“Did you mean them?”
Beau lay still, one hand on his stomach, the other cradling his head. She shifted, turning toward him on her side, propping her head on her hand. All that black hair spilled over her palm and fell along her arm to kiss the green, green grass.
“Well…” Her mouth trembled a little. “Did you?”
“No,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean those things I said. Those things were lies, pure and simple.” He felt the pained smile as it twisted his mouth. “And I put a lot of effort into being a convincing enough rat-bastard that you would think they were true.”
She let out a long sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath and just remembered to let it out. “I knew it. But I did want to hear you say it—just like I want to hear you tell me why you said those things…”
“Hell,” he replied, as if that was any kind of answer. All these years he’d nursed a hopeless yearning that someday they’d talk about this. Someday when she was a grown woman and he’d come through the bad things he’d done, come through to make himself another, better kind of life. And today, here they were, and it was happening just the way he’d always dreamed it might….
One hell of a day, this one. The day Daniel said he considered Beau as his son. The day Starr showed up with offerings of food from her family—and now seemed reluctant to leave.
He said, “I only knew then that I was headed for a bad place and I had to make sure you didn’t try to follow me there.”
“Oh,” she said so softly, the way a woman might exclaim upon unwrapping some beautiful and priceless gift. And then she called it exactly that—a gift. “Life is so strange, isn’t it?” she whispered, a certain reverence in her low voice. “I mean, what you did was so brave, really. It turned out to be like a…gift. It hurt so damn much when you did it, but my life turned out different—so much better than the direction I was headed in then, because you said those awful things to me, because they made me think, and think hard, about my life. Made me reach out to my family. Made me see I had to make some changes, or I could end up…” She didn’t seem to know how to finish.
So he did it for her. “…following the wrong guy down the road to nowhere and never finding your way back?”
Tears welled in her eyes, making them shine all the brighter. She didn’t let him see them fall, but sat up, quickly, turning away. Touched in the deepest part of himself, he left her alone until she could get it together.
Finally, she turned to him again, her eyes still suspiciously shiny-looking, but her soft cheeks dry. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s it. But look.” She raised her hands, palms up, as if to include everything—the rushing water, the summer sky, the trees whispering in the warm wind—even the faint cooing of that lone mourning dove. “I didn’t go down that road. And you…well, Beau. You have done it. You’ve found your way back.”
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