Prologue
To anyone that I fell out with last year, fuck you this year as well.
—Nettie’s secret thoughts
Nettie
“I’m pregnant.”
Boone, my sweet Boone, looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Um, what?”
We were in high school. This should’ve never happened.
But when it came to Boone Daniel Windsor, I had zero control.
I never had, and I never would.
“I don’t…” I trailed off as Boone’s mother came into the room, eyes ablaze.
They were always ablaze.
“Bartholomew.” Gail Windsor, the woman of the house and the keeper of all the money, walked into Boone’s room like it was her right to do so.
And maybe it was.
This was her house, after all.
Well, hers and her husband’s.
Her husband made all the money.
Her husband, might I add, who wasn’t Boone’s father.
Boone was an oopsy baby with the pool boy.
Literally, the pool boy.
Gail got pregnant by the pool boy and Sawyer, Boone’s stepfather, had lost his shit. Gail, however, was all ‘if you kick me out I’m going to take half your fortune with me’ so he kept her.
He also, joy to the world, decided that Boone wasn’t to blame for his mother’s transgressions.
He embraced Boone as a son and took him under his wing.
That was the only thing that saved Boone’s personality from being just like his mother’s.
Though, Boone didn’t see his mother as being the wild bitch of the west.
He saw her as his precious mother that would never hurt him in any way.
He was wrong. Gail Windsor was a fuckin’ nut case that liked to run his life like a drill sergeant. She scheduled our dates—seriously, she scheduled our dates to work in with her schedule. She chose what he wore. She chose which school sports he played. And even worse, she had chosen what he would do with his life after graduation.
She’d decided that he would be a doctor, and as an act of rebellion that was really quite rare for Boone, he’d decided to go into veterinary medicine and not human medicine.
It was the best blowup I’d ever witnessed, and Gail blamed it all on me.
If she only knew just how different his life path would be had he gotten to choose it himself. If I’d actually had a role in helping him figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
