“He had no right to.”
“Right or not, he did it. And I’m not sorry to admit I was relieved. You deserved better than that boy, sweetheart.” Dad’s voice went quieter, edging into the soft realm. “You deserve better than any boy God’s seen fit to make, but I knew Boone would only become a bigger black hole in your life if he stayed.”
I crossed my arms over my knees and dropped my head onto them. Seven years later, and I was still about in tears talking to my dad about Boone Cavanaugh. I prayed I wouldn’t find myself in the same situation in another seven years. “He was never a black hole. He was pretty much the one bright spot in my universe. You guys never got it, but that’s the way it was.”
Dad snorted. “What do you call him getting you pregnant when you were both a couple of kids then?” He shook his head as he popped off another snort. “If that’s not a black hole, I don’t know what is. What were you two going to do if you had stayed together? Have that baby, let this whole city see you as a single teen mom pretending to play house with a boy whose five-year plan was staying out of prison? I wanted more for you, baby. I wanted the world.” He threw his arms out in front of us like the world was right there, just waiting for me to grab it. “Not some run-down shack in that trailer park he grew up in.”
“Don’t you see, Daddy? I had the world. He was my world. He was everything I wanted, and Ford took that away from me.” I didn’t realize I’d started to cry until I felt my dad’s arm wrap around my shoulders. It didn’t feel forced or unnatural; it felt like a concerned father trying to comfort his daughter.
He patted my back a few times before his arm returned to his side. “Don’t play the victim. Ford didn’t take anything from you. You just didn’t have a hard enough grip around it. Because somewhere inside you, you knew what we all did. Boone wasn’t your future.” His words weren’t gentle, but his voice was.
“I loved him.”
“I know baby.” He sighed. “I know.”
Swiping the tears away, I felt anger shoot back into my blood. I was on an emotional roller coaster and couldn’t find my way off. My dad was going to wish by the end of this conversation that he’d never sat beside me. “I loved him so much, and he just left. He took Ford’s word and walked away. Didn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t answer the door no matter how hard I pounded on it. He just seemed to forget all about me.”
My dad shifted beside me right before he worked the top button of his shirt undone. “That, baby, might not have been all Ford’s doing.” He stopped to put out his cigar. “I wasn’t planning on telling you this, your mama doesn’t even know, but I think you should know something about Boone you don’t.”
My heart stalled. “What?”
“He came back.”
“Wait.” I shook my head, feeling like I’d just been dropped in the middle of the desert and wasn’t sure which direction I was facing. “When did he come back?”
“A few days after the big scuttleloo.”
What he called a “scuttleloo” I called the worst day of my life—the day Boone and I had broken up.
Dad continued, “I suppose he needed a few days to cool his jets or whatever, but he came back to the house late one night, looking for you. I was out on the porch and caught him before he climbed that tree to sneak into your room.”
“Did you talk to him?” My voice was barely audible.
He gave a burly-sounding grunt. “I wanted to run him off with my shotgun, but it was locked in the safe. Your mama made sure of that after all that went down between you and Boone, guessing I’d shoot him on sight when and if he showed back up.”
“Daddy . . .”
“What?” He looked at me with an innocent expression. “That’s what any boy deserves who doesn’t take the proper precautions and responsibility to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.”
“It wasn’t unwanted.” I looked him straight in the eye, unyielding. “Unexpected, but please don’t ever call it unwanted again.”
He returned the unyielding stare, the master I’d probably picked mine up from. “You were eighteen.”
“It was my baby.”
He blinked and looked away. “So Boone wanted to see you. Right then and there, at half past midnight. I told him no and to get lost. He said he wasn’t leaving until he saw you. I told him you were asleep and I’d be damned if he ever saw you again. He said he’d wait outside until you woke up and that he’d be damned if he let me keep him from seeing you.” He waved his hand in an et cetera motion.
“So it was about a typical conversation between you and Boone.”
“Up to about this point. That was the day after . . . you’d lost the baby. You remember?”