He paused long enough for me to believe he was really considering that. But when he looked at me, I knew his answer. I might have believed in second chances, but Boone didn’t. I should have known. He’d stopped believing in fairy tales before most kids even learned what they were.
“You live in California. You have a successful, growing business,” he said. “I live here. I’m unemployed. I get calls from the bartender to pick up my mom, from the sheriff to come pick up my mom, or from bill collectors wondering why my water bill’s late. Taking our past out of the equation, our current lives don’t leave much hope for us either.”
I stood staring at him, wanting to hold on and knowing I had to let go. “When did you start caring about shit like that?”
“When I realized shit like that matters.” He swung his leg through the open window and crouched to lower the rest of him inside.
I lunged forward a few steps, but part of me knew that no matter what I said or how I tried to hold him down, Boone was already gone. “What matters is how we feel about each other. What matters is what we could be together.”
He was already on the other side of the window—in a different world—when he tried to look at me. He tried again. But he couldn’t. Just when I thought my heart had been ripped apart, frozen whole, transformed into vulture carrion, and wrapped tightly in barbed wire, I realized that couldn’t have been true, because how could it break the way it was now if it hadn’t been whole before?
Boone tried to smile, but he couldn’t do that either. “What matters is that I didn’t deserve Clara Abbott back then, and I sure as hell don’t deserve her now.”
I was suffocating.
The humidity was nearing the eighty-percent margin, and the temperature was nearing ninety. I was encased in The Thing, staggered around the back lawn with my family as the wedding photographer prepared to take the family photos. But I didn’t want to have my photo taken with my family for the family photo. After everything I’d learned last night, I didn’t feel they deserved the title of my family anymore . . . or maybe I didn’t belong with their family anymore. One of those things.
My dad had told a terrible lie to the person I cared about most when I was seventeen, a lie that drove him away. How could I ever look my father in the eye without being reminded of that?
Charlotte had stolen my boyfriend right out from beneath me, betraying me in ways arch nemeses would have hesitated over first.
My mom, who had no direct fault tied to her pertaining to Boone’s and my breakup, had been quite the opposite of supportive the entire time we had been together.
Avalee was the only Abbott worth a darn, me included, but next spring, she’d be the one leaving the Abbotts.
My family was more a formality at this point.
The wedding was still a couple of hours away, and once Miss Charlotte Abbott officially became Mrs. Charlotte Abbott McBride, the four hundred wedding guests would flock from the big white church in town back to my parents’ house to dance and eat and celebrate an evening that my parents had shelled out a cool million to bring into being.
It was excessive and obscene and appalling. Caviar wouldn’t be on the menu at my wedding should that day ever come, nor would fifty-year-old scotch for the men and elegant charm bracelets for the women be party favors.
I didn’t want the fifteen-person symphony playing Mozart and Beethoven, and I didn’t want the towering ice sculptures that would be decorated around the west lawn by the time the reception started, and I certainly didn’t want the Grammy-award-winning singer my parents had booked as a surprise for the newlyweds to serenade them in their first dance.
I didn’t want excess. I didn’t want show. I didn’t want the veneer of perfection when all one had to do was scratch at the surface once or twice to see that nothing about the Abbotts was as it seemed.
My parents were being ushered into position with Charlotte and Ford, my mom’s hand draped around Charlotte’s elbow while the photographer positioned my dad’s hand around Ford’s shoulder. It went there naturally. It stayed there just as naturally.
Ford was the type of person my father approved of. The kind who was deserving of Quincy Abbott’s respect and one of his daughters. Ford McBride, the man who’d lied to Boone that he’d been in bed with me too, implying what he had to drive Boone away . . . the same person who’d cheated on me with my sister . . . this was the type of person who deserved my father’s respect?
No wonder Boone had never gotten a lick of it from him. He didn’t measure up in the immoral and devoid of decency categories.
Boone. Just thinking his name made my heart wring hard enough I had to shuffle back a few steps and lean into the giant oak behind me. He’d left last night after our rooftop talk, leaving the check I’d made out to him on my nightstand.