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She looked down at her food and tried to keep her expression mild, while he made a choking sound. “Did a trout bone get caught in your throat?” she asked.

“I think you know it didn’t,” he rasped.

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing her food around her plate. “I was maybe a little bit jealous.”

Why are you saying these things, Bix?

His expression looked cool, unreadable. “Don’t be,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Did you hear what I said about not doing relationships?”

“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said about me not planning too far ahead for the future?”

“Bix...”

“I’m not innocent,” she said. “I have had a really hard life. And you are not part of the hard.”

He looked at her for a good thirty seconds. “I don’t want to be,” he said. “I never want to be a part of the hard things that have happened to you.”

“You couldn’t be.”

“Bix, one time, my dad took a man’s whole ranch as collateral. It was all legal, all the paperwork. I watched that man come apart when my dad came to collect. Elias King unraveled the men in his debt, and he enjoyed it. And I didn’t feel sorry for him. I felt like my dad was amazing at his job. At what he had set out to do. I thought my dad was a hero. That’s how wrong I can be. That’s how much bad I can be in somebody’s life.”

“Okay, but counterpoint,” she said. “You can’t know what you don’t know. And you can’t unknow what you know now.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I didn’t know how to get a bank account. And maybe half of the reason I was so angry about some of the things in the system was I didn’t know how to use them. Now I know how to use a high-yield savings account. I can collect interest on my money. That’s just making money doing nothing. I didn’t know that. I can’t be angry at myself for not knowing that. But also, I know it now. So I’m never going to view banks quite the same as I used to.” She picked at a piece of rice in stuck in her teeth. “Still pretty skeptical about fishing licenses.”

She looked at him eagerly, trying to gauge his response to that. She didn’t know if she should be embarrassed that she made it kind of obvious thatshe was attracted to him. Because she had never told a man she was attracted to him before. Because she had never been attracted to a man before Daughtry. And suddenly, she was seized with a very desperate need to act on that attraction.

To feel something normal.

That’s what it was. Daughtry had given her this beautiful, normal life. And she wanted the other things that came with that.

And somehow, she had a feeling that it was contingent upon him understanding what she was trying to get him to understand.

“That’s if you think it’s about knowledge. And not about an innate lack of empathy,” he said.

“You think that it’s excusable that I didn’t have empathy because of my situation. But I’m not sure if yours was as much different from mine as you think it is.”

“It is, though. I always had food. I always had shelter.”

“Your dad controlled it all, though. And I imagine that he made it really clear that your position in the household was based on how happy he was with you. Right?” Daughtry looked uncomfortable then. “What? I can’t be the only one in the hot seat all the time. You know so much about me because of how it was when you found me. But I don’t know that much about you.”

“You know as much as anybody.”

“The way that your family has rallied around each other is honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. And one thing that kept me at the ranch, evenbefore the beer brewing, was all of you. But I can tell that you didn’t grow up in a happy house.”

“Gee, what gives you that idea?”

“I have a nose for dysfunction,” she said, tapping said feature. “Considering it’s my natural state.”

“I’m not looking for absolution.”

“Because atonement is different somehow?”