Page 66

“G.I. Joe was in the army, Everly. Isaac was in the marines. And there are things you can’t possibly understand going on here.”
“I didn’t see your poor mother trying to blow you up. I saw her trying to pretend everything was okay when it clearly wasn’t.”
“Let me tell you something aboutmy poor mother.” He threw the words at her as if they cut his throat on the way out. “My father was a navy pilot. He died when I was ten in a stupid training accident. And my poor mother mourned him so deep and so hard that she was remarried within the year.”
“I don’t know your mother very well,” Everly said quietly. “But I do know that you can never really know someone else’s heart.”
Blue stalked toward her, but she held her ground. She ignored the trembling sensation deep in her belly, which seemed to reverberate down into her knees, and let him come at her.
Because whatever this was, whatever was happening,she knew without a shadow of a doubt that no matter how mad this man got at her, or near her, he would never hurt her. The same way she knew her legs would carry her forward when she decided to walk. The same way she knew her neck would hold her head up.
She knew this man like she knew her own bones.
You love him,a little voice whispered inside her.
Maybe she’d loved him already, but she knew that right here, right now, in the attic of his parents’ house in their old hometown, she was seeing more of the real Blue than she’d seen so far. More than he’d shown anyone else in a long, long while, if she had to guess.
She couldn’t pretend it wasn’t what she’d wanted.
“She got two daughters and a new husband,” Blue was seething at her. “A big house. And I got Ron. Good old Ron, who thought he could make a man out of me.”
Everly knew his stepfather, too, of course. She remembered Ron Margate as a man who cooked a decent hot dog and told incredibly corny jokes. And, in the years since, had been a neighborhood staple. Always had his Christmas ornaments up over Thanksgiving weekend and tucked away again on New Year’s Day, things Everly’s father had always appreciated and commented on.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t have been an awful stepfather to a grieving kid.
“Blue, I don’t think—”
“You don’tknow, Everly. You were across the street riding a pink bike up and down, clueless and sheltered. You have no idea what it was like growing up in this house.”
“Did he...” She wished she’d never started down this road, but she had. Now she had to deal with it. “Was he abusive?”
“He wasn’t my father.” Blue threw it at her like a right hook. “And he didn’t like it when I reminded him of that fact. Over and over and over.”
“Did he get physical with you?”
Blue muttered something under his breath. “The man is a dick. The end. Why are you dragging all this up? All you need to know is that I learned to do without my mother a long time ago. I’m glad that she took the opportunity to lecture me on my manners, because it reminded me that nothing ever changes. She made her choices.”
“She loves you,” Everly whispered, as if that could change anything.
Something washed over Blue, intense and wild. His eyes blazed.
“Don’t talk to me about love. My father loved my mother. He died because he loved his country. And look what kind of loyalty that got him.”
“It looks like he has your loyalty,” Everly said softly. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
She had never seen this man look so... undone as he did then. And she would have gone to him, put her arms around him, tried to hold him the way he’d held her in his old twin bed last night—but she knew, somehow, that he would never allow it.
That he got something out of standing there solitary and wounded and forever alone. He wanted it that way.
She could see it all over him.
And she told herself that the hollow sensation in herchest had nothing to do with him. It wasn’t her heart breaking. It wasn’t anything.
But even the lies she told herself weren’t working today.
“I don’t lie awake at night wondering where it went wrong with the woman who abandoned him the minute he was gone,” Blue told her. “I wonder how I can ever be even half the man he was, knowing full well I can’t.”
“Well, of course you can’t,” she said. “He’s a ghost.”