“Gee, thanks. I guess I probably don’t.” I glanced at him from the corners of my eyes. He’d moved close to the bed, draping his long arms into it as he watched me. “But when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t anticipating getting called an uppity bitch before half a bottle of water was launched into my face.” I could still feel the water on my hairline and the neckline of my dress, but I wasn’t really upset over that. “I guess I’m just a little surprised. For your mom to have gone from hating me to loathing me with every fiber of her being, you must have told her what happened between us . . . even though you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.” I had to shift my position in the bed. There was nothing comfortable about this.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, Clara, and I didn’t.” Boone’s voice was so low it was almost a whisper. “But instead of telling her how things really went down, I told her you left me—that it was you who ultimately walked away.”
My forehead folded into creases. “Why would you tell anyone that?”
“Do you really think anyone would believe that I was the one who’d walked away from you?” He let that hang between us in the muggy Charleston night. “Do you really think anyone in this town would have bought that Boone Cavanaugh broke up with Clara Belle Abbott?” He shook his head. “No one would have believed that, and those who did would have figured out real fast there must have been one hell of reason for me to do so. I didn’t want anyone to do too much digging to get to that hell of a reason . . . so I told everyone what they’d all been anticipating since the day we walked through the county fair the summer we were sixteen, holding hands—you got your slumming out of your system and were moving on to bigger and better things.”
My head shot in his direction. “I never once treated you like you were trash, Boone, so don’t try to staple your insecurities to me. Where you came from and who you came from didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was where you were going and who you’d become.”
Boone hung his head between his arms, kicking at one of the tires absently. “Yeah, well, no matter what you thought of me, I was well aware what the rest of this town thought, and the easiest way to explain what happened between us was to tell everyone what they’d been waiting to hear. It was simpler that way. Less explaining involved.”
I curled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “So you never told anyone? About what really happened?”
Boone didn’t reply right away. Just when I thought he was going to climb into the truck and pretend the question had never been posed, his head lifted, his eyes landing on me. “I made you a promise, Clara. I never told anyone, and I never will.”
I rolled my head to the side to look at him. Where had we gone wrong? Where had all of that love gone? I knew about the mistakes we’d made, sure, but how had we let them tear us apart? Why had we let them break us? Fast forward seven years to us living separate lives on opposite sides of the country, and I still felt like every part of me was being pulled in his direction, not so much by choice but by something that ran deeper, something between instinct and destiny.
“Thank you. For not telling,” I said. “I’m sure that must have been hard, not being able to talk with anyone about what happened.”
“I figured enough people already knew.” Boone’s hands curled around the edge of the truck bed. “And the only person I would have wanted to talk to was you . . . and you were gone.”
From inside the cab, I heard Dolly’s familiar alcohol-induced snoring. “I guess that explains why your mom’s affection for me has only increased. Although with the way she used to talk, I thought she would have thrown a celebration when she found out I finally took her advice and left her son ‘the hell alone.’”
Boone’s gaze shifted inside the cab, where his mom’s head was slowly falling from sight. She’d be curled up on the bench before he climbed in. “You would have thought so, right? I guess people can’t decide what they want in the end.”
“I guess not,” I agreed, though I didn’t really. At that moment, I felt as if I knew exactly what I wanted.
“Why don’t you climb into the cab? From the smell of her breath, Ma won’t be waking up until about noon tomorrow.” Boone held out a hand to help me out, but I stayed in place.
“Thanks, but I’m not going to take my chances.” I scooted my hands under my backside to form a kind of seat and settled in. “Something tells me that if Dolly Cavanaugh thought she could break through dimensions to get to me, she would. I don’t want to be in a vehicle flying forty down some back road when she snaps awake and decides to shove me out the passenger-side door.”
Boone shook his head, smiling. “I won’t argue with you there. My mother does hold a rare kind of hate for you in her heart.” He stared inside the cab where his mom’s head had disappeared from view. “You want to trade places with her? It’s not like she’s going to notice she’s in the back of a truck.”
I shook my head. “She’s your mom. Leave her where she is.”
“And yet here I am, still playing parent to her.” He glanced at the bar and let out a quiet sigh. “I’m just so sick and tired of this same old shit.”
“Then why keep doing it?”