She had broken their friendship. Broken Hunter. Broken herself.
She’d been so worried about hurting her best friend.
And in the end she had.
But it wasn’t Alaina.
It was Hunter.
What would Wolf and Sawyer say when they found out?
They’d just had dinner with them last night and now she...
She pulled into her brother’s place just after noon, hoping she might catch him for lunch.
She wasn’t disappointed. It just so happened that Evelyn, Violet, Wolf and Sawyer were there.
“Hi,” she said. “I came to...talk.”
“What did he do?” Evelyn asked, leaning out of her chair, holding her fork.
“Nothing,” Elsie said. “It was me.” She wondered if she sounded as disembodied as she felt.
“Elsie?” Sawyer asked.
“I’m sorry. I am sorry that everyone got dragged into this. I’m sorry that Hunter is hurt. I can’t do this, though. And I didn’t want everyone involved. They got involved. And I can’t...” She dissolved then. Dissolved into sobs.
And then Wolf and Sawyer were holding on to her, keeping her steady. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t comfort me. I’m the one that did this. I’m the one that...”
“Hey,” Sawyer said. “We all make bad choices when we’re running scared.”
“True,” Wolf agreed.
“I’m not scared,” she said. “Just impossible. It’s impossible because I messed everything up with Hunter and I’m afraid. I’m afraid that...”
“You’re just afraid,” Evelyn said. “And who wouldn’t be? With the life you all had. But fear doesn’t do anything for you. When there’s not a snake in the grass, Elsie, fear isn’t helping you. And serving it doesn’t offer you anything.”
“But what if...”
“Yeah. I asked that question always,” Sawyer said. “What if. That’s what it’s like to love somebody. You have your moments. Your whole days, where you ask yourself what if. Because you get to where you can’t imagine your life without them. But you can’t fix that fear, you can’t fix that wound by removing them from your heart. Because they’re already there. Believe me, I tried.”
“Same,” Wolf said.
“But I thought I was fearless because I hadn’t been hurt.”
“I was wrong,” Evelyn said. “You are just very good at hiding it.”
“I want to keep hiding it,” Elsie said. “For me and everybody.”
“Well, it’s too late. We can all see it. But you’re still breathing.” Violet smiled. “You’re not a failure just because you had a moment of faltering courage. Wolf had the same problem.”
She looked over at her brother, who was the strongest person she’d ever known, and the most reluctant to show an emotion, and she expected him to dispute that. But he didn’t.
“Yes,” he said. “I did. Because you know what, this stuff is scary, Elsie. And it’s easy to feel like you’re in over your head. But you have to remember that when you’re with somebody who really loves you, they’ll be there to help you out when you fall in. They will bring your head back up above water. Because that’s what love is.”
“What if I fail?” Elsie said. “What if I fail. That’s the thing that I can’t stand. I don’t know my mother. Not at all. What if I’m like her. And how would I ever know?”
“I would hope,” Sawyer said, “that you would be a lot more like us. We are not perfect, not by a long shot, but we are the ones that stayed. We are the ones that raised you. Look at us. Staying.”
“It’s just...”
“Are you really afraid of that? Are you afraid of the things you can’t control?”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Instead, she didn’t say anything, and she sadly ate lunch, and then half of a pie.
“What if...what if I’m just not enough,” she whispered finally. “My mom left me. When I was a baby.”
It was Sawyer who knelt down beside her. “My mom left me too. And look. Look what I have now.”
“How do you know you’re good enough?”
“If Hunter is half the man I think he is, then what I want you to do is look at his face. Look at how he sees you. Look at how he loves you. If you can see yourself the way he does, then you’ll know. When Evelyn looks at me,” he said, his voice rough, “that’s when I know.”
Elsie remembered Hunter’s face.
And suddenly it was like seeing clearly for the very first time.
And she knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HUNTER LOOKED AT his brothers. He had never told them any of this. And it was something that he wasn’t looking forward to. But it explained a lot. And it was time. He didn’t want to hang on to any of this bullshit anymore.
“I told Mom to leave.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gus asked.
“I told her to leave.”
Tag, Brody and Lachlan all regarded him from around the table. “You were eleven years old,” Tag said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”
“You can’t possibly blame yourself for an adult deciding to leave because an eleven-year-old told her to,” Brody said.
“I did. For a long time. But you know, I told Elsie Garrett about it, and hearing her repeat it back to me... It made me realize how stupid it was. But I distanced myself from all of you for a long time because of it. Because I felt responsible for it. Because I felt responsible for how things went with Dad after. And Gus...”
Gus’s face turned to stone. Hard, and just as rough. “What happened between me and Dad is between me and Dad. Both what happened here,” he said, gesturing to his face, “and what happened when he left.”
“I felt like I didn’t deserve to be one of you. I felt like I did something to betray you. To betray us and—”
“You knucklehead,” Gus said. “You never betrayed us. Our family was messed up. It is messed up. The only thing that ever mattered to me was that I could protect you.”
“You did that,” Brody said, “and then some. And it isn’t fair that you had to.”
“That’s what older brothers are for,” Gus said. “We protect people.”