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It was like there was an earthquake inside him, no matter how he tried to hold himself together. No matter how Blue tried to forbid himself to shake, everything crumbled anyway.
He stood there and fought it for longer than he should have, and he still didn’t feel solid.
“Mom, I don’t—”
But it was too late. When he looked over, his mother was gone.
Blue told himself it was for the best.
He jogged upstairs, threw his bag together, and took that shower. Alaska Force was rolling out tonight. He intended to wake up in his own bed the following morning, so he could get started on forgetting everything that had happened.
Everly was safe now. That was what mattered. He’d done his job.
He got out of the shower, toweled himself off, and finally put on some clean clothes. There was nothing like a fresh T-shirt, a new bandage on his nicked arm, and a nicely battered pair of jeans after a long, drawn-out situation to make a man feel brand-new and something close enough to content. He walked back out into thesitting room, finally feeling like himself again after too many earthquakes to count, to find his stepfather there in the armchair. Waiting for him.
Blue hadn’t seen him since last night, when he’d been nothing but a pale face through the screen door.
In his memory, Ron Margate was big. Brawny and mean, red-faced like a bulldog. But the man sitting before him didn’t look like a monster. He just looked like an old guy. He was a lot smaller than Blue remembered, for one thing, and whether that was age creeping up on Ron or the unreliable memories of a scrawny seventeen-year-old kid, Blue couldn’t tell.
Ron had lost most of his hair. He was wearing glasses, a polo shirt, and khakis—not exactly clothes to inspire fear. And he didn’t light into Blue the minute Blue stepped into the room. Instead, he just looked at his stepson.
As if they were both noting all the changes between them. The last time they’d been in this house together, Ron had been bigger. Now Blue could snap the older man like a twig.
The trouble with that was, he knew exactly what he was capable of. And he wasn’t about to attack an unarmed man.
“I’m not really in the mood to do this tonight,” Blue said shortly. “I have a plane to catch.”
Ron didn’t snap at Blue to mind his tone. He didn’t demand respect. He didn’t shout something abouthis house,his rulesand then shove Blue as punctuation, the way he might have years ago.
“Here’s the thing, Blue,” Ron said instead, squaring his shoulders as he spoke. “I’ve had a long time to thinkabout how things went down after I married your mother. Twenty years and then some.”
“This will be a short conversation, then. Things were crappy.”
The Ron that Blue remembered would have blown up at that. But this Ron only let out a quiet sound, like a sigh. “I don’t blame you. You were a little kid, messed up with grief. I was the adult, and I take full responsibility.”
That... wasn’t what Blue had been expecting.
To put it mildly.
Another aftershock slammed through him, and he found himself shifting from one foot to the other. He locked that down, hard. His long-hated stepfather might have just blown his mind, but he didn’t need toshowRon that.
“I lost my father,” he managed to bite out. “I didn’t need another one.”
“But you see, I wanted a son.”
When Blue could do nothing but stare at him, completely unable to make that statement fit with all his memories, it was Ron’s turn to shift in his chair. He looked down at his hands, then up at Blue again, as if he were forcing himself to man up. To look Blue straight in the eye.
“I love my daughters. But I wanted a son and was thrilled that Regina came with you in a single package. And I couldn’t understand why everything I did to make you that son backfired. Spectacularly.”
Blue felt as if something were choking him. He would’ve preferred it if something really were, because then he could have fought it. As it was, the sensation was almost too much to bear. It pressed down on his throat. It made it hard for him to breathe.
He’d never wanted this man before him to be anything but the villain he’d always been in Blue’s head.
He’d never wanted Ron to be complicated. Or conflicted.
Ron was evil. Ron was supposed to be evil, pure and simple.
“I thought I could repair it, in time. But you never came back.” Blue was rocked again by how steady the other man’s gaze was. “I don’t suppose there’s an apology I could make to you that would take away how out of hand I let things get between us back when you lived here. I allowed a confused teenager to provoke me, and I’m not proud of it. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”