“Maybe it’s a little bit easier to blame your dad when he chased off lots of women,” she said.
He laughed. The sound cruel and hard. “I guess so.”
“But nothing about it’s easy, is it?”
“No. Nothing about it is easy.”
“What about the day your mom left?”
“I cried like a baby,” he said, grinning at her.
And she knew the grin was fake.
“Who was there for you?”
“My brother, Sawyer. He told me to pick myself up and quit crying. He said there was no point to tears. He was right.”
“Wolf,” she said. “That’s not fair. You should’ve been allowed to cry.”
“What was he going to do with the weeping little brother? Sawyer was strong. He was strong for me. He was strong for Elsie. He always was. Sawyer... I’m not surprised that he’s a great father. I’m not surprised that it was easy for him to decide to be there for his baby. Sawyer is the kind of good that so many people think they are, but few people are. And yeah, it wasn’t the most sensitive thing. He feels bad about it now. But it wasn’t the wrong thing to tell me then. Because what was the point of dissolving? No one was going to take care of us but us. Our dad didn’t give a shit.”
“I’m so glad that I had my dad,” Violet said. “I can’t imagine just not having anyone. I mean, I chose to deal with some of my grief on my own. I chose to shut them out. But I got really scared. I got really scared about losing him, too.”
“I wasn’t scared of losing my dad. I knew he’d never leave the ranch. He had nothing else. But it was never about us.”
“I’m so sorry, Wolf,” she said. “I’m so sorry for what we both went through.”
“Nothing to feel sorry about,” he said. “We just do better, right?”
“I’d like to do better,” she said.
“The bar is painfully low,” he said, and she couldn’t help but laugh, because he had a point.
“I think I’d like to do a lot better than our mothers. Than your father.”
“We will.”
They stopped walking. “Does it still hurt you?”
“What?”
“Your mom.”
He shrugged. “I told you. No. I feel angry about it sometimes. But that’s...”
“The only thing you let yourself feel?”
He laughed. Hard. “I let myself feel other things.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist and looked at her, his gaze burning into hers. “You make me feel a whole lot of things, Violet.”
“Do I?” She put her hand on his cheek. “What do I make you feel?”
He turned his head and bit the inside of her wrist. “What you make me feel I can’t exactly show you right now.”
And it made her hot. Because everything with him did. But it was just a sidestep. Because he didn’t want to talk about actual feelings. And she remembered all the times she’d seen that sadness in his eyes. And she knew now that it was about grief. About what he’d lost. Maybe just Breanna, but maybe his mother, too. And there was anger there. It simmered. Banked heat that he couldn’t fully hide. But there was more. And she didn’t know how to get to it. She didn’t even know how to get him to admit to it. Didn’t know how to get him to let it out.
She showed him around the entire ranch, giving him a tour of the dairy facilities, and embarrassing herself by not really knowing what half of the things were called. But while she was comfortable with many aspects of living on a ranch, she was not enmeshed in the dairy life.