She suddenly looked horrified. Stricken. “Is Hunter mywhat?”
“Your boyfriend?”
“Oh, hell no,” Elsie said. “He’s like my... He’s like another brother to me. It’s not like that at all.”
“Is it not?”
“No.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I assumed.”
“No. Not at all. Not even remotely at all. He is...the biggest pain in the ass that I have ever known. Except for maybe my brothers. Who are actually the worst.”
It felt a little like protesting too much to Violet, but what did she know?
“Why are they the worst? I feel like I have a right to know. All things considered.”
Elsie frowned. “They’re not the worst. I shouldn’t have said that. They took care of me. Wolf and Sawyer. Wolf’s not... I dunno. I’m sure you’ve noticed. He’s hard to know. He doesn’t really like to share a lot about himself. But that’s fine. We’re not really great at talking about our feelings. Suits me just fine. Honestly. It’s our parents who were the worst,” she said.
She was echoing what Wolf had already told her.
“They really... They left us to handle it. They left them to handle it. My brothers. And they were... Look, they’ve been good to me. Even Hunter has. He’s all right.”
She nodded. “Yeah, he’s told me a little bit about your family. I... My mother left.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s...something that he and I have talked about.”
“You got Wolf to talk to you? I think you’re a few steps ahead of the rest of us, then.”
Violet sat in that for a moment, her heart beating a little bit faster. Wolf did talk to her. He’d shared quite a few things with her. She wondered if...if that meant more than she’d realized at the time.
Wolf walked into the room then, his dark eyes burning on hers. Everything slowed down. Stopped. Maybe she had to reevaluate the way she was thinking about this. The way she was thinking about him.
What do you want?
Her whole conversation with her dad was resonating in her. He hadn’t wanted a life for her that wasn’t happy. Hadn’t wanted one she didn’t choose. But the more she thought about her life and Copper Ridge, the more she realized she hadn’t exactly chosen it, either. She had been swept up in it. That was the thing. She had stayed because she wanted to make her parents proud of her. Because she was so afraid of disappointing them. So here she was, sitting in—not a worst-case scenario—but sitting in a pretty rough scenario, and while her dad wasn’t thrilled, he hadn’t disowned her. And at the end of the day, she had never really believed that he would. Because he wasn’t her mother, and she knew that. She had always known that. So it had to be something else. She wasn’t protecting herself from their abandonment.
Maybe she had just been protecting herself. Not trying anything. Not going too far from home. Not going from the absolute safety that her father and Alison represented.
She hadn’t asked to have a revelation sitting there in Wolf’s brother’s house, but she was having one.
She had always told herself she just wanted to make them proud, but...she knew that she made them proud. They had never been stingy with their praise. She had always known that they loved her. She had always known that they would support her. No, what she was afraid of was failing. Being hurt. Being thrust back into that place that she’d been at when she was thirteen. Feeling like she just wasn’t good enough. Because how could she be good enough, if her mother had left her. How could she be?
What was wrong with you when your mother left you?
But here she was, in a house with three people who had been abandoned by their mothers. And none of them seemed broken. Wounded, maybe. Because how could you go through something like that and avoid being wounded? But it wasn’t... It wasn’t like she had always thought.
And yes, she was afraid. She was afraid of being hurt. But the question that resonated inside her, the one that she really needed to think about, was what did she want her future to look like?
Because she had always known she didn’t want to be alone. She had intended to go on dates. She had intended to kiss men. She had intended to have sex. She had intended to fall in love and get married and have children. But something had always stopped her from taking the next step. Fear. It was that simple.
Wolf had been terrifying, from the moment he had first walked into the bed-and-breakfast, but Wolf was also too compelling to ignore. And that was... It was a gift, in many ways. Because it had propelled her into something new. Into something different.
She blinked, her eyes feeling scratchy.
What did she want?