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Blue thought his jaw might shatter—it was clenched so tight.
He still felt like he was being choked. Now there was that tight band of steel around his chest, too, pulling so hard and fierce he thought it might cut him in half.
He didn’t understand what the hell was happening.
And Ron wasn’t finished. He stood up, letting his hands dangle at his sides, and if anything, his gaze got more direct.
“You’re older now than I was when I married your mom,” Ron said. It was another unpleasant reality check that Blue didn’t know what to do with. “I’d like to think you’re not the same grief-stricken kid you were then.”
“I’m not.”
Ron nodded. “I accept what I did and the fact I could have—should have—handled things better.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” He sounded stiff. Formal.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Ron replied. “I’dlike your forgiveness, but that’s your choice, not mine. I understand why you left here and didn’t want to come back. But it’s not me you hurt. It’s your mother.”
Blue didn’t know, as he absorbed that blow, why he hadn’t seen this coming. It was like he’d set foot in Illinois and had lost his crap on every level. No control and no clue where the hell he’d lost it. No idea what was coming and no ability to counter it or, better yet, prevent it.
It was like he was seventeen all over again. He snuck a look at his own arm to make sure it hadn’t shriveled away into scrawniness while he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Day after day, year after year, you made your mother pay, when the person you were mad at was me,” Ron said quietly. It would have been better if he’d yelled the way he used to. It would have been better if he’d lost his temper, thrown things. Made this familiar. Because then Blue could dismiss him. This was like torture. “It’s forgivable in a boy. Expected, even. But you’re not a little boy any longer, are you?”
“I don’t think I need you to tell me how to be a man,” Blue managed to say.
He felt as if he and Ron had finally gotten in that fight he’d dreamed of when he was younger, only it was clear that Ron was winning. Because he was still standing tall, while Blue felt battered. Bruised all over.
“If you want to hate me for the rest of your life, go ahead,” Ron said in the same quiet way that Blue hated—hated—he could feel resonating inside him. “Your father—”
“Careful. Be very careful.”
“—was a good man,” Ron said, ignoring Blue’s interruption. “A great man. Your mother misses him every day, as she should, and the only link she has to him on this earth is you. You, Blue. And you’ve stayed away for twenty years. All I ask is that you think about that. Think about her.”
“She—”
“She loved your father,” Ron said softly. “And I know it hurt you that when he was gone, she found a way to love me. But she never, ever, stopped loving you, Blue. Or him. Never. Maybe it’s time to stop punishing her. All she did was live.”
And Ron didn’t wait for Blue to respond to him. He simply walked off down the stairs, leaving Blue to stand there in the wreckage he’d made.
And, worse, to face it.
He didn’t want to face anything. He wanted to disappear—but that was what he always did, wasn’t it?
It was what he was still doing.
It’s what you’re good at,he growled at himself.
He hadn’t followed his instincts and left Everly to handle her situation on her own, and look what had happened. He was embroiled in twenty-year-old family drama that made him want to shoot himself up with an actual chemical numbing agent so he could stop feeling a damned thing.
Blue made his way back down the stairs, his heart seeming to beat double time, as if he were doing a few rounds of PT instead of calmly leaving a house he hadn’t wanted to come back to in the first place.
At the bottom of the stairs, he had a choice. He could hear the television on in the den, and he knew withouthaving to look that his mother and Ron would be in there, sitting together on the couch, a perfect picture of domesticity. He’d hated that when he was younger. More than hated it, he’d seen every instance of the two of them enjoying their life as a personal insult and a betrayal of his father.
He didn’t feel that way now. He didn’t know what he felt, was the trouble—except mixed-up and battered and something that crept too close to powerless.
All she did was live,Ron had said.
He could go into the den. He could try to act like the son his mother deserved. Or he could do what he wanted to do and GTFO. Now.