“It’s Christmas Eve,” she reminded him.
“So?”
“So everything will be closed, and the hotels will all be booked up. Where will you stay?”
He didn’t answer, but his eyes flickered with uncertainty before hardening again.
Johanna changed tactics. “Tell me what happened this morning. What changed?”
Boone’s laugh was bitter and sharp. “Nothing changed. I just woke up. Realized I was kidding myself, thinking I could start over here.”
She studied him, noticing the way his gaze kept darting toward the road, toward escape. There was something more he wasn’t saying. “Did something happen with your mother? Or your uncle?”
His hands tightened on the wheel until the leather creaked.
Bullseye.
“Hank came by the bunkhouse this morning,” he admitted finally. His jaw worked for a moment before he continued. “Mom was wandering down Main Street lastnight. In her nightgown. Looking for me. Saying I was kidnapped and she needed to find me.”
Johanna’s chest tightened. “Oh, Boone.”
“Someone called Hank, so he couldn’t resist coming to remind me of what a failure I am as a son, as a man.” His voice went flat, detached. “He said I was a fool if I thought Walker Nash could save me from the bad half of my DNA. Said Mom’s getting worse because of the stress I’m causing her.”
“That’s not how dementia works,” she said gently, though she was starting to suspect dementia wasn’t the mental illness Leonora Goodwin-Callahan suffered from. She couldn’t be sure without a thorough examination of the woman, but what Boone described sounded a lot more like schizophrenia. “You know that.”
“Do I?” He finally looked at her, and the guilt in his eyes was crushing. “She raised me alone after Dad died. Worked herself to the bone to keep me fed and clothed. And what did I do? Got sent to prison. Now she’s wandering the streets in the middle of winter because her brain’s so fucked up she can’t remember where she is.”
“Those two things aren’t connected.”
“Hank seems to think they are.”
“Hank is using your mother’s illness to manipulate you. And it’s working.”
“But he’s not wrong. I’m a drowning man, dragging everyone around me down.” His gaze shifted over to where Walker still waited impatiently on the porch. “If I stay, I’ll drag Walker down, too.”
“Walker’s a grown man,” Johanna said. “He makes his own choices. And he chose to help you.”
“Then maybe he’s a fool, too.”
She was quiet for a moment, watching the way Boone’s fingers flexed against the steering wheel. He looked so...haunted. Lost. Sad. And she was running out of time to reach him.
“Your mother’s wandering,” she said carefully. “That must have scared you.”
“I wasn’t there,” he whispered. “I should’ve been there, and I wasn’t because being around her is… hard. Having her look at me like a stranger is worse than not seeing her at all. You can’t know what that’s like.”
But she did know. She knew exactly how it felt to watch someone you loved slip away, to become a stranger to them. She’d lived it with Nick in those final months, watching depression turn him into someone she no longer recognized.
“You can’t be everywhere at once, Boone. You can’t save everyone.”
“I can’t save anyone.” The words came out harsh, bitter. “Every time I try to help somebody, it goes to shit.”
There it was. The real wound underneath everything else.
“Is that what you think? That helping people only makes things worse?”
His jaw clenched. “I know it does.”
“Because of your mother?”
