Page 20 of Love Me Again

And walking into that little room, stopping short at the sight of Josie Symington. She’d been crooning sweet words to someone’s old mutt in her lap while she’d administered ear drops. Her hair had been pulled back in a ponytail. She’d been wearing a purple turtleneck, and it had accentuated the sharp chin. Then she’d looked up at him and smiled in polite welcome.

But he’d felt struck. Like he’d finally been welcomed home.

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” Boone couldn’t believe he’d said that aloud to his mother, but he had and there was no taking it back.

Or wiping that shocked look off her face.

“Not really, no,” she said after a long, stunned silence.

Didn’t that just figure? Before he could figure out what else to say with that sitting between them like some kind of dead weight, she continued.

“But… Your father, he always said the moment he saw me…” She clapped her hands together. “Something hit him. And that was it. I thought he was full of it.” Her smile was warm and wistful. She might have married Ben, but there had never been any doubt that his father was her first love, a true love.

She cocked her head, studied Boone. “Maybe he wasn’t.”

All his life he’d been told he had his father’s eyes and not much else. Owen Tyler had been the upstanding, good, straight-and-narrow kind of man that Shane had become.

Boone had always been the opposite. Long before he’d strived to be. He’d been born loud, antsy, and wanting to stir up trouble. Losing Dad followed by Shane’s overbearing shit… It had just spurred him on to lean into all those natural impulses. To be the trouble and chaos he’d seemingly been born with.

To find this small little thing he might have had in common with his father was breathtaking in both its pain and pleasure.

“You know, one of the few things I remember Dad saying to me was, I always knew you were going to be a wild one.” Boone didn’t know how old he’d been, but Dad had put him on a horse and Boone remembered, in a vague, dreamlike kind of way that he’d begged to have the reins to himself. To go faster. To do anything but take this slow, plodding route with his dad holding the reins.

“He was so envious of the wild ones,” Mom said fondly. “Probably because he didn’t have a wild bone in his body.”

Envious? Boone could only stare at his mother. “But…”

“I know it’s hard to believe, and maybe I should have…” Mom inhaled, like something hurt. Something deep, lodged in. Boone knew the feeling too well to ignore or pretend he didn’t know what it was, even if he didn’t know why. “When you see your kids as adults, you start to see the places you went wrong. I can’t go back and fix them.”

“Mom…” He wanted to stop whatever she was about to say, but he didn’t know how.

“There were things I should have told you all about him, but for a very long time, I simply couldn’t bear it.”

“I…I know you think the way I am has something to do with Dad dying, but it doesn’t. Not really. I’ve always been this way. It’s just who I am.”

Her mouth firmed. “There is a lot about you—things I struggle to understand, no doubt—that are just the way you were born. I’ll grant you that, but your father dying and the way this house dealt with that marked you. All of you. All of us. It’s doing a disservice to him to pretend it didn’t.”

Boone wanted to shove that away. The idea anything had to do with this irrevocable moment in his family’s life that hadn’t touched him the way it had touched his older siblings—couldn’t, because he barely remembered Dad. Barely remembered the years of grief and suffering that came after. Barely remembered Shane learning how to shoulder all those burdens.

But Mom kept talking.

“He would have been proud of you. Not of everything you’ve done, no,” she amended, before he could argue. “But of you. He’d be so proud of all of you. No matter the mistakes. You’ve all made them. Even Shane. Even me.”

Boone looked at his hands. He knew that. But he’d always felt his were…worse. Or less defensible. Or maybe just things his family could never understand.

This, case in point. “She wants a divorce and she deserves what she wants, and God knows I don’t. Not after everything. I don’t know what she told you about things, but whatever it is, she isn’t lying. She isn’t making me the bad guy because I did leave. I left her. Out of the blue. For no reason except to save her from…” He swept a hand down his body. “This.”

“Save her or save yourself?”

He couldn’t meet his mother’s gaze then. It was the question he asked himself the most often. The question he really didn’t have an answer to. If only because it always felt like both.

“You never did like to be taken care of,” Mom said on a sigh.

“She’s taken care of enough, Mom. Her whole damn life has been taking care of everyone else, and I didn’t want that for her. You get that, right?” If she could understand him, if she could absolve him, then he’d know how to make this right.

Call the lawyer. Cut hope clear off.

But Mom only sighed and scooted close enough she could put her arm around his shoulders.