I huffed, frustrated at what he was saying and why he wasn’t letting himself get pissed like I was. I was frustrated at everything tonight, the stars and moon included.
“Come on, Clara. Look at me. Look at you.” Boone waved between us like he was comparing an apple to a rotten banana. “You wouldn’t have gotten where you have if your dad hadn’t stepped in and taken a butcher knife to the bond tying us together.”
“How the hell do you know that?” My tone was biting, arsenic in audible form.
“How can you keep denying it?” He paused long enough to give me a chance to respond. When I didn’t, he continued. “Look at what I’ve done with my life. Other than age seven years and move into my own place, not a hell of a lot. I’m still sputtering through town in that same relic of a truck. I’m still as single as I have been since the day we broke up and as I will be until the day I die. I’m still getting calls to come rescue my mom, and I’m still an utter failure at saving my sister. Shit, even my business, the one good thing I tried to do with my life since you and me, failed. That’s what I am, Clara, a failure. It might have taken me a while to see it and you might be blind to it, but your dad has always seen it. He wanted better for his daughter than some failure. I would have wanted the exact same for mine had ours been born a daughter.” When his eyes sealed shut again, he forced them back open. “I can’t fault him for what he did.”
“Well, I can.” I sounded like a child. One who hadn’t gotten her way and, instead of moving on, was going to pout about it for the next lifetime and a half.
“Why?”
I actually grunted in frustration at his iron-clad calm resolve. This wasn’t the way I was used to these kinds of talks/arguments going between Boone and me. “Because you might choose to see yourself as a failure, but that’s not what I see when I look at you. That’s never been what I’ve seen. Even a few days ago, even still being under the impression you’d left me because I’d gotten pregnant, I didn’t see a failure when I looked at you that night in the bar.”
He laughed. “I am what I am. Not what you think I am.”
That, perhaps more than anything else that had been said or discovered tonight, was what pissed me off the most. The person I’d looked up to for years was incapable of seeing just how great he really was.
My hands curled around my legs. “That’s right, Boone. You are what you are. Not what you think you are.”
Instead of laughing, this time he sighed his disagreement. “You know, all that time, I was so worried about protecting you from your family and the rest of this town, I didn’t see where the real danger really was. It was right beside you.”
“You weren’t a danger.”
Boone shifted so he was at the edge of the roof. When he looked down, it was almost like he was contemplating what it would feel like to drop from this high up. I found myself creeping closer, ready to grab him in case he did something crazy.
“Tell that to the guy who just found out he walked out on the girl he loved when she was pregnant because he believed the lies of two people who he knew better than to trust,” he said.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” My anger was dissipating now that I’d run out of adrenaline. I was back to feeling sad and betrayed. I would have rather been angry. “Realizing we’ve both been living with the wrong idea of what really happened back then.”
“Strange isn’t the word I’d use to explain it.”
“What word would you use?”
He glared in front of him. At nothing. Or at everything. With Boone, the enemy was as obvious as it was invisible. “Devastating,” he said at last, like the word had drained the last of his energy.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I should have.” I scooted closer, until I could have reached out and touched him if I wanted to. “The moment after I found out. I should have told you before my parents found out and before Ford found out and he told you.”
“Why didn’t you?” His voice was muffled and his expression tired, as if someone had plunged a hose into him and siphoned the life right out of him. Down to the last drop. “Why did you wait to tell me?”
I glared out at the same darkness, knowing my eighteen-year-old reasons for not telling him weren’t the same reasons the twenty-five-year-old version of me would have used. “I’d only found out a week earlier, Boone. I think I was paralyzed those first few days, then I just felt so many things, I couldn’t tell what I felt most. I couldn’t explain what had happened to myself yet, so I wasn’t sure how to go about explaining it to you.”
“How far along were you?”
“Ten weeks,” I answered. That hung in the air for a moment.
“And I just left you.”
“You came back. You might not have made it through the front door and I might have only just found out about it, but coming back counts for something.”