“Right,” he said. “And you hated it.”
“At our ranch in Texas there were rolling hills and fields. All these bluebells. I pretended I didn’t like living in the country, but I really did love it. And I didn’t realize how much until we left. But I was... I was angry and resentful about everything then. And I had been for a few years. I know that my dad moved us here partly because of me.”
“How long did it take for you to start to feel like this place was your home?”
“It wasn’t a place, so much. Not the time here. It was the people who loved me. It was being with my uncles. Alison. Learning to bake. Getting really invested in that and falling in love with it. And gradually it became my home.” She took his hand, and they began to walk down one of the well-worn paths that would take them to the main barn. Though it was quite a long walk.
“Do your dad and uncles all get along? I know something about sharing ranch land.”
“Yeah. They all get along. More or less. Alex is more involved in Clara’s ranch. He does things here, but they have their own place.”
“That probably helps.”
“Probably.”
They walked along silently, and she let out a slow breath, watching as the air turned to a cloud and swirled away.
“So you were thirteen when your mother left.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ve talked about that.”
“Tell me about the day she left.”
She looked at him, and saw that his gaze was sharp.
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
“Well...” She realized that she had never talked about this. She had told people that her mother had left her. It was a thing that came up. She didn’t have a mother. Not really. Hadn’t for a number of years. That was easy to say. But the actual story? The actual time? That was something she just didn’t talk about.
“As an adult I realize that relationships are complicated,” she said. “And that there was a lot going on between my parents that I didn’t see. And probably a lot of things my dad protected me from. A lot of red flags and things like that. But as it was... I didn’t see any. I didn’t know that they weren’t happy. I didn’t know my mother wasn’t happy. And one day she was gone. I didn’t realize it. I got up, and she didn’t help me get ready for school. But she didn’t always. Sometimes she slept in. My dad didn’t say anything. It just seemed like a regular morning. But when I came back, well, then I realized something was different. I realized... And my dad said she left. And he said he didn’t know where she’d gone. Just that she’d packed up all of her things andgone.”
She took a shaky breath and shoved her hands into her pockets. “And I thought...she’ll be back. Because my dad is a good man. Because I’m her daughter. And I couldn’t imagine that she would stay gone. So I remember the day she left, but that wasn’t the worst day. I was numb then. I kept thinking it was a mistake. I kept thinking she would realize. And then... Well, then I had to face the fact that that wasn’t what was happening. That she had left on purpose. That she didn’t want to come back. She didn’t want to come back to me. Didn’t want to come back to anyone.”
Violet blinked hard. “It was a month after she left that I started to get angry.” She remembered sitting out on the rope swing that hung off the tree in the middle of the field, watching the wind whip over that endless grass, creating a wave of green in front of her. It was so peaceful, so tranquil. And her rage boiled over. And she had screamed. And her voice had carried across the grass on the wind. A wave of fury.
She had wanted to uproot all that easiness. That lazy Texas day. And she had wanted to fill it with the kind of restless anger that had infused her veins. It was longer than that for her to cry. The sadness waited. And it was when she realized she wasn’t going to get a chance to have a confrontation with her mother.
That was what had finally cooled her rage.
Because she had been clinging to it so that someday she could yell at her. Ask her what she’d been thinking. And in her angry teenage heart, it had been a speech filled with expletives, things that would shock her mother. She had honed her outrage to be something like a weapon. And it had protected her from the deeper, darker feelings that came along with the abandonment.
“It took me months to cry,” she said. “And then when I did, I did it in my room. I didn’t want my dad to see. I didn’t want him to be worried. I didn’t want him to be sad. But he knew. And then it just kind of calcified. And turned into something hard.” She smiled. “You know, I tried rebelling.”
“Really?” he asked, arching a brow.
“Yes. I had been here for just a couple of weeks. And I got invited to a party. And I got drunk. And there was this boy there... I don’t know that I liked him. But I wanted somebody to like me. And he seemed to like me. As long as I kissed him.”
“I don’t like this story,” Wolf said.
“Well, you’ll like my dad’s role in it.”
“Get to that part.”
“My dad and my uncles busted the party up. And my dad just about killed that guy. In fairness, I think he was over eighteen, and I was drunk. So my dad was furious. Like, shooting fire from the heat of a thousand suns furious.” She laughed. “I realized I wasn’t going to get what I wanted out of that. And then I really got involved with other things. And Alison did so much to get rid of my anger. And then I... I never wanted to do anything to mess up the security that I had. Because you can’t... I know that my dad and Alison would never... They would never not love me. But you can’t... You can’t lose a parent like I did, likewedid, Wolf, without wondering why. And worrying that it was you. That maybe there was something about you that...”
“I know,” he said.